Towards an understanding of consumer´s behavior of buying secondhand products on social media

Abstract

Due to the research scarcity in consumers’ secondhand shopping behaviors and consumer-to-consumer (C2C) businesses on social media platforms, this thesis decided to concentrate on both secondhand products and social media. The aim of this thesis is to explore the consumers’ behaviors of buying secondhand products on social media – a new channel of doing C2C businesses. To achieve the research aim, I conducted a combined method consisting of 106 questionnaires and ten semi-structured interviews to collect empirical data in this study. After an analysis of empirical data including both qualitative and quantitative data, three main findings were concluded. (1) The thesis firstly explored the social media as an open online marketplace for doing secondhand transactions. Consumers exchange secondhand products on social media in an ‘informal’ way. (2) The finding highlighted that, when consumers buy secondhand products on social media platforms, they are involved either in a ‘passive shopping’ process or an ‘active shopping’ process, and it is highly possible for them to experience hedonic factors (e.g. excitement, fun) due to the occasional and unexpected shopping results. This finding provides two new angels (passive shopping and active shopping) for researchers to analyze consumer behaviors in the future. (3) By extending the study of secondhand shopping motivation from Guiot & Roux (2009, 2010) in an online trading environment, the findings showed that utilitarian aspects of shopping such as price, convenience, product information, and trust mainly drive consumers’ behavior of buying secondhand products on social media. Environmental consideration and recreational motivation are less important than those utilitarian aspects