Understanding user disengagement in social shopping platform: The roles of fatigue and dependency

As social media enters maturity and the platform landscape becomes saturated, strategy shifts from acquisition to retaining the existing base and fostering sustained activity. This shift is amplified by social shopping platform, where the integration of social media affordances with transactional infrastructures reshapes discovery and purchase. Yet aggregate indicators can overstate economically meaningful participation in the presence of passive consumption and post-launch contractions. To explain why high fatigue prompts some users to withdraw while others remain, this study models disengagement as the joint effect of push and pull. Push is operationalized as user fatigue from social overload and technostress. Pull is operationalized as platform dependency grounded in social interaction and informational support. Using validated measures from a survey of 371 social shopping platfomr users in South Korea and China, we conduct two parallel 2 × 2 analyses contrasting factor types and levels. Results show robust main and interaction effects: social overload has a stronger positive association with disengagement than technostress, whereas informational support has a stronger deterrent effect than social interaction. Along the level dimension, disengagement peaks when fatigue is high and dependency is low, is minimized when fatigue is low and dependency is high, and stabilizes at intermediate states; high fatigue with high dependency yields inertia-driven continuance. The study advances a dynamic account of attenuated engagement and motivates segmented retention strategies tailored to specific fatigue and dependency profiles. Limitations and future directions include longitudinal designs, behavioral trace data, and cross-cultural validation.