An investigation of micro-entrepreneurs' adoption of social media for e-commerce in the Philippines: A sociocultural perspective

• Main Author: Catedrilla, Jypzie M.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2021
• Subjects: Electronic commerce > Philippines; Trust; Small business; E-Commerce
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etdd_infotech/1; https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1000&context=etdd_infotech
• Institution: De La Salle University

The exponential growth of the social interaction activities on the social media platform has created an avenue for any micro, small-medium enterprise (MSME) to grasp the economic opportunities at the grassroots level, thus social commerce has emerged as a new era of e-commerce. The adoption, as well as the economic returns of these social commerce sites, have been widely explored in recent literature in analyzing and understanding the several factors influencing the early adoption of this platform. However, most of these technology adoption frameworks used in the previous studies lack sociocultural emphasis to underscore the nature and characteristics of these enterprises. This research employed phenomenology by analyzing descriptive survey data, interviews, and focus group discussions to uncover Filipino micro-entrepreneurs' experiences. A total of 385 responses were collected from the online descriptive survey and 30 micro-entrepreneurs were interviewed to describe the phenomenon of entrepreneurship activities situated in the platform. In this study, the characteristics of Filipino micro-entrepreneurs selling in the social media platform are presented, the different trust dimensions towards their customers are discussed along with their strategies and activities in building trust relationships. The study concludes by discussing the implications of the study to the social capital theory, small business, social commerce, technology, digital payments and delivery services and academe while highlighting the limitations of the research to provide future scholarly directions.