Consumer behavior in social commerce: a scoping review of the scientific literature

Social commerce has emerged as a central paradigm within electronic commerce by seamlessly integrating transactional capabilities with social interaction, user-generated content, and platform-driven influence mechanisms. This scoping review systematically maps the body of research on consumer behavior in social commerce. Unlike previous reviews constrained by narrower temporal scopes or specific theoretical lenses, the present study synthesizes bibliometric, geographical, methodological, theoretical, and thematic evidence drawn from a comprehensive corpus of 472 studies published between 2010 and 2026. The findings indicate sustained growth in the literature, particularly since 2019, characterized by a strong predominance of quantitative cross-sectional designs and structural equation modeling (SEM). Core constructs such as trust, perceived value, purchase intention, and social influence continue to dominate the field. Nevertheless, emerging research streams increasingly examine phenomena including herd behavior, fear of missing out (FoMO), social proof, influencer-consumer relationships, live commerce, and short-video environments. The review also highlights a pronounced asymmetry in global knowledge production, with substantial contributions from Asia, North America, and Europe, contrasted by comparatively limited representation from Latin America and Africa. By updating and integrating previously fragmented strands of the literature, this review provides an evidence-based mapping of the field's evolution—from early technology-adoption and generalized trust models toward more psychologically nuanced and platform-sensitive explanations of consumer decision-making. Furthermore, it identifies key priorities for future scholarship, including greater theoretical integration, methodological diversification, longitudinal and comparative designs, and expanded research in underrepresented regions.

Social commerce has established itself as an evolution of electronic commerce by integrating social interaction processes, user-generated content, and transactional mechanisms within digital platforms, thereby reconfiguring information, persuasion, and purchase decision processes. In particular, the rise of live streaming shopping has intensified the experiential dimension of consumption by combining audiovisual stimuli, social presence, and real-time interpersonal influence. Recent evidence shows that broadcasters' influence tactics significantly affect consumers' purchase intention, mediated by approach-avoidance motivations as well as by the presenter's physical attributes and persuasive strategies (Dang-Van and Nguyen, 2025). These findings confirm that social commerce environments operate not only as sales channels but also as spaces for the symbolic construction of value and meaning.

Contemporary literature highlights the central role of trust, brand–consumer relationship quality, and B2C interaction in shaping purchase intention and loyalty in social commerce platforms. Recent studies show that brand relationship quality has a direct positive effect on brand loyalty, moderated by cultural values, underscoring the need to incorporate sociocultural dimensions into the analysis of digital consumer behavior (Mazaheri et al., 2025). Complementarily, interaction between companies and consumers strengthens retailer brand equity, which acts as a mediating mechanism toward purchase intention on social platforms (John et al., 2025). These results reinforce the idea that relational value constitutes a strategic asset in socially mediated digital ecosystems.

The field has also advanced toward the integration of hybrid theoretical frameworks to explain consumer behavior in social commerce. The articulation of technology acceptance, signaling theory, and social contagion has enabled more comprehensive explanations of repurchase behavior among Generation Z, showing that digital trust signals, lenient return policies, and fear of missing out (FoMO) act as key drivers of repurchase intention (Khoa et al., 2025). Convergingly, the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) model has been widely used to explain how digital environment stimuli (e.g., social presence, immersion, perceived enjoyment) activate psychological states that lead to trust and purchase intention (Hongsuchon et al., 2025; Yang et al., 2025).

On the other hand, the evolution of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) has expanded formats, channels, and audiences that influence purchase decisions within social commerce. The transition from textual reviews to audiovisual content, virtual influencers, and immersive environments has complicated credibility and persuasion processes (Filieri et al., 2025). In specific contexts such as WhatsApp, exposure to promotional content increases purchase intention through perceived credibility, with effects moderated by tie strength (Nyazabe et al., 2025), highlighting the importance of relational structures in social messaging platforms.

Finally, recent literature shows thematic diversification toward areas such as sustainable consumption and AI-driven personalization. In the green real estate sector, social commerce acts as an influence channel on purchase intention through social norms, positive eWOM, and pro-environmental identity (Anand et al., 2025). In mobile commerce, app design, AI-based personalization, and social commerce integration significantly influence Generation Z's purchase intention, mediated by mobile app marketing (Hasim and Nazri, 2025). Nevertheless, gaps remain in the integration of these approaches within inter-regional and longitudinal comparative frameworks.

Although previous reviews have laid valuable foundations, they have left behind a rapidly evolving and fragmented body of evidence. Busalim and Hussin (2016) synthesized studies published between 2010 and 2015, Han et al. (2018) mapped the literature up to 2017, and Zhao et al. (2023) examined consumer behavior research from 2017 to 2021 through the lens of the S-O-R framework. More recent syntheses have tended to concentrate on specific outcomes—such as customer experience or engagement—rather than providing a comprehensive integration of publication dynamics, methodological patterns, theoretical constructs, international collaboration networks, and emerging platform-specific psychological processes.

Since 2021, the field has expanded significantly, with growing attention to live commerce, short-video platforms, influencer marketing, fear of missing out (FoMO), social proof, herd behavior, AI-driven personalization, and consumer behavior in emerging-market contexts. Consequently, there is a clear need for an updated scoping review that goes beyond merely enumerating publications. Such a review should critically examine how the conceptual architecture of the field is shifting, identify persistent methodological and geographical concentrations, and highlight mechanisms that remain insufficiently integrated.

Accordingly, the present study aims to systematically map the scientific literature on consumer behavior in social commerce, with particular emphasis on the evolution and current configuration of the field. Specifically, this scoping review addresses the following research questions: RQ1: How has scientific production and citation impact evolved over time and across different publication outlets?

RQ2: Which methodological approaches and theoretical constructs dominate the literature, and to what extent do signs of methodological or theoretical concentration persist?

RQ3: How is research geographically distributed, and how is it structured through patterns of international collaboration?

RQ4: Which thematic clusters and emerging socio-psychological or platform-specific processes characterize the current research agenda?

Study design

This study was conducted as a scoping review, following the methodological framework originally proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005) and further refined by Levac et al. (2010). The reporting of the review adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses extension for Scoping Reviews (PRISMA-ScR) guidelines developed by Tricco et al. (2018). A scoping review design was deemed most appropriate given the study's aim: to comprehensively map the breadth, key characteristics, conceptual structure, methodological patterns, and existing research gaps within a rapidly evolving and heterogeneous body of literature, rather than to synthesize evidence for estimating pooled effects or testing specific hypotheses.

Information sources and search strategy

The systematic literature search was conducted in the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus databases in 2026, prior to manuscript submission. These two databases were selected for their extensive multidisciplinary coverage across the social sciences, business, information systems, marketing, and consumer behavior domains. No lower temporal limit was applied to the search. This approach was deliberate: rather than imposing an arbitrary starting date, the review allowed the historical emergence and development of the field to emerge organically from the retrieved evidence. The final corpus of included studies spans the period from 2010 to 2026. Because 2026 was an incomplete publication year at the time of the search, productivity data for that year were treated as partial and were not directly compared with fully completed prior years in the temporal trend analyses.

The search equations were applied to the title, abstract, and keywords fields, adapted to the syntax of each database, as follows: Web of Science (TS field): TS = ((“social commerce” OR “social media commerce” OR “social shopping” OR “commerce through social media” OR “purchas* through social media” OR “buy* through social media” OR “shopping on social media”) AND (“consumer behavior” OR “consumer behaviour” OR “purchase intention” OR “buying behavior” OR “online consumer behavior” OR “purchase decision” OR “consumer decision”))

Scopus (TITLE-ABS-KEY fields): TITLE-ABS-KEY ((“social commerce” OR “social media commerce” OR “social shopping” OR “commerce through social media” OR “purchas* through social media” OR “buy* through social media” OR “shopping on social media”) AND (“consumer behavior” OR “consumer behaviour” OR “purchase intention” OR “buying behavior” OR “online consumer behavior” OR “purchase decision” OR “consumer decision”))

Eligibility criteria

Included were original articles and reviews published in scientific journals that explicitly addressed consumer behavior, purchase intention, or decision-making processes in social media environments. Excluded were documents other than articles and reviews (e.g., conference proceedings, editorials), studies focused solely on traditional electronic commerce without a social media component, documents in languages other than English and Spanish, and duplicate records across databases.

Study selection process

Records retrieved from Web of Science were exported in.xlsx format, while those from Scopus were downloaded in.csv format. The datasets were subsequently merged and processed using RStudio. Duplicate records were identified and removed using the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) as the primary key and title matching as a secondary criterion.

From an initial yield of 1,434 records (795 from Scopus and 639 from Web of Science), 679 were excluded prior to screening due to duplicates and the application of document-type and language filters. This process left 755 records for title and abstract screening.

A preliminary semi-automated screening of titles and abstracts was then conducted in R using the grepl() function with keywords related to social commerce, consumer behavior, purchase intention, and shopping via social media. This step served solely to prioritize potentially relevant records and did not substitute for full eligibility assessment. All preselected records underwent manual review against the predefined inclusion criteria. Of the 755 records screened, 279 were excluded at the title and abstract stage, leaving 476 for full-text eligibility assessment. Four additional records were excluded during this phase because they did not focus on purchases within social media environments or did not examine consumer behavior. Consequently, the final synthesis included 472 studies.

The PRISMA flow diagram visually documents this selection process, illustrating the progressive reduction of the initial database yield at each stage and explicitly linking every reported number to a specific inclusion or exclusion decision, thereby enhancing the transparency and auditability of the review (View Figure 1).

Data extraction

From the included studies, information was extracted regarding year of publication, country or region of study, objectives, methodological approach, theoretical frameworks, variables analyzed, social media platforms considered, and main findings.

Analysis strategy

The analysis integrated descriptive bibliometric indicators with thematic and network mapping techniques. First, annual publication counts and cumulative citation totals were examined to delineate the temporal evolution of the field and account for citation-window effects. Second, journal-level productivity and accumulated citations were analyzed to identify the most prolific and influential publication outlets. Third, country-level co-authorship networks were constructed to map the geographical structure of knowledge production. In these networks, node size reflects publication volume (prominence), links represent collaborative relationships between countries, and total link strength (TLS) indicates the overall intensity of each country's international collaborations. Fourth, keyword co-occurrence analysis was performed to uncover the conceptual and thematic structure of the literature. In the resulting map, node size corresponds to keyword frequency, links denote co-occurrence relationships, link strength reflects the intensity of these associations, and colors represent thematic clusters generated by the VOSviewer algorithm.

The quantitative bibliometric mapping was complemented by a qualitative thematic reading of the full texts. This combined approach facilitated the identification of recurrent theoretical mechanisms as well as emerging socio-psychological and platform-specific themes. The analysis remained primarily descriptive and exploratory in nature; no inferential statistical tests were conducted, and no causal inferences were drawn from the bibliometric networks.

Publication trends and citation impact

Figure 2 shows the temporal evolution of scientific production and impact — measured through the number of annual citations — in the field of consumer behavior in social commerce during the period 2010–2026.

In terms of productivity, an initial phase of incipient growth is observed between 2010 and 2014, with a reduced number of annual publications, suggesting that the social commerce phenomenon was still in an emerging stage with low theoretical consolidation. From 2015 onward, a progressive and sustained increase in the volume of studies is identified, which intensifies markedly from 2019 onward. This growth accelerates significantly in the period 2021–2025, reaching the highest number of annual publications and evidencing the consolidation of social commerce as a relevant line of research within studies on consumer behavior, digital marketing, and electronic commerce.

The pattern of cumulative growth reflects a clearly exponential trend, indicating not only an increase in the quantity of research but also an expansion of interdisciplinary interest in the phenomenon, integrating perspectives from management, information systems, consumer psychology, and digital communication studies. This increase temporally coincides with the global expansion of social media use as commercialization channels, as well as with changes in digital consumption habits intensified in the post-pandemic context.

Regarding scientific impact, measured by the number of citations received per year, a more fluctuating pattern is observed. The highest citation peaks are concentrated between 2016 and 2020, suggesting the publication of seminal or highly influential works that structured the field and served as conceptual foundations for subsequent research. From 2021 onward, a progressive decrease in the number of annual citations is apparent — a phenomenon that can be explained by the citation window effect, since more recent studies have not yet had sufficient time to accumulate impact.

Overall, these results evidence a phase of rapid expansion of the field, accompanied by a process of progressive theoretical maturation.

Most productive and influential journals in social commerce research

Table 1 presents the main publication sources in the field of consumer behavior in social commerce, considering both productivity (number of articles) and academic impact (number of accumulated citations).

The results show a concentration of scientific production in a reduced set of journals specialized in electronic commerce, information systems, digital marketing, and consumer studies, reflecting the progressive consolidation of social commerce as an interdisciplinary field.

From a productivity perspective, Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services and Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research stand out with the highest number of published articles (16 each), indicating their role as recurrent dissemination spaces for empirical and theoretical research on digital consumption and social-media-mediated commerce. Similarly, Sustainability (Switzerland) and Electronic Commerce Research and Applications show relevant participation in terms of volume, suggesting the incorporation of social commerce into broader research agendas related to sustainability, digital transformation, and business models.

Regarding impact measured by citations, a differentiated pattern emerges. International Journal of Information Management stands out notably by concentrating a high number of citations (3,339) with a relatively smaller volume of articles (14), indicating high influence of the works published in this journal and their potentially seminal character in the theoretical and methodological structuring of the field. Similarly, Electronic Commerce Research and Applications shows high relative impact (1,669 citations in 12 articles), confirming its relevance as a reference journal in advanced electronic commerce and social commerce studies.

Other journals such as Internet Research and Frontiers in Psychology combine moderate productivity with significant impact, evidencing the growing incorporation of psychological, behavioral, and socio-technological approaches in the analysis of consumer behavior in digital environments. In contrast, sources with lower accumulated citations — such as International Journal of Data and Network Science or Cogent Business and Management — suggest more recent publication lines or lower international visibility, opening opportunities for diversification of scientific dissemination spaces in this emerging field.

Geographical distribution of scientific production and international collaboration networks

Figure 3 presents the co-authorship network by country in research on consumer behavior in social commerce.

The results evidence a highly concentrated network structure around a reduced set of countries that act as central nodes in the production and circulation of knowledge in the social commerce field.

China positions itself as the main global actor, both in publication volume (135 documents) and impact (10,804 citations) and relational connectivity (total link strength = 79). Its central location in the visual network reflects a dominant role as a collaboration hub, articulating links with countries in East Asia, North America, and Europe. Complementarily, the United States (60 documents; 5,662 citations; TLS = 53) and the United Kingdom (28 documents; 1,984 citations; TLS = 52) stand out as strategic nodes connecting multiple regional clusters, consolidating their role as referents in the generation of widely cited theoretical, methodological, and empirical frameworks.

Within the Asian context, a dynamic cluster is observed formed by Taiwan (41 documents; 2,410 citations; TLS = 34), South Korea (27 documents; 2,200 citations; TLS = 8), and Malaysia (45 documents; 1,177 citations; TLS = 53), evidencing the relevance of Asia as an empirical and conceptual epicenter of social commerce, consistent with the high penetration of social commerce in these markets. Likewise, countries such as India (39 documents; 561 citations; TLS = 28) and Pakistan (16 documents; 759 citations; TLS = 25) reinforce the expansion of the field in emerging economies with strong adoption of social platforms as purchase channels.

In contrast, the network reveals still marginal participation from Latin America and Africa, with limited presence of countries such as Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, and South Africa, characterized by low production volumes and reduced relational centrality. This pattern suggests a relevant geographical gap in the literature, opening opportunities for the development of contextual research in developing economies, particularly in regions where the use of social media as an informal and social commerce channel has high penetration but scarce academic systematization.

Overall, the results confirm an asymmetrical international collaboration structure, dominated by production poles in Asia, North America, and Europe, with significant potential for expanding South–South networks and inter-regional comparative studies in future research agendas.

The observed geographical asymmetry should not be interpreted merely as a bibliometric artifact. Several contextual factors may plausibly account for this pattern. The prominent representation of China and other Asian economies aligns with the earlier and more extensive diffusion of integrated social-shopping platforms, live-streaming commerce, and sophisticated digital ecosystems in these markets. Such environments have provided fertile empirical settings for examining social interaction and commercial transactions at scale. Cultural dimensions may further contribute to this concentration, as social influence, trust transfer, relationship quality, and collective decision-making cues often carry heightened salience in certain cultural contexts. Supporting this view, cross-regional studies have demonstrated that consumer responses and purchase intentions in social commerce vary significantly across cultures (Ng, 2013), while more recent research suggests that cultural values can moderate the effects of brand relationships (Mazaheri et al., 2025).

In contrast, the comparatively limited research output from Latin America and parts of Africa likely reflects not only differing trajectories of technology adoption but also structural disparities in research infrastructure, funding, international collaboration networks, database indexing, and the academic institutionalization of social commerce as a research domain.

It is important to note that these explanations remain interpretive rather than causal. Future research should test them through rigorous comparative, cross-cultural, and institutional studies.

Thematic structure of the field and keyword co-occurrence

Figure 4 presents the keyword co-occurrence map in social commerce research.

The central node of the map is occupied by social commerce (261 occurrences; TLS = 431), confirming its role as the articulating concept of the study domain. This term is strongly linked to purchase intention (111; TLS = 216) and trust (68; TLS = 176), evidencing that purchase intention and trust constitute the main explanatory mechanisms of consumer behavior in social commerce environments.

A second relevant thematic axis is structured around consumer behavior and its terminological variants, reflected in the high frequency of consumer behavior (31; TLS = 62) and consumer behaviour (19; TLS = 39), indicating conceptual convergence between Anglo-Saxon traditions. This cluster connects intensely with classic electronic commerce constructs, such as e-commerce (36; TLS = 89), electronic commerce, and e-WOM/ewom (13–9 occurrences; TLS = 29–17), suggesting that the social commerce literature draws from previous electronic commerce frameworks, incorporating social dimensions such as interaction, social presence, and user-generated content (Liang and Turban, 2011; Chen et al., 2017; Cheung et al., 2014; Wang and Yu, 2017; Yusuf et al., 2018).

Likewise, a cluster centered on platforms and interaction environments emerges, where social media (43; TLS = 102), social media marketing (17; TLS = 38), Facebook, and Instagram stand out, reflecting the empirical centrality of these platforms as contexts for analyzing purchase behavior (Bai et al., 2015; Molinillo et al., 2020; Jin and Ryu, 2020; Xiang et al., 2016). In parallel, a recent subfield associated with consumption practices mediated by live streaming emerges, with terms such as live streaming (10; TLS = 19) and live commerce (5; TLS = 7), evidencing the evolution of social commerce toward more immersive and interactive formats (Guo and Li, 2022; Sun et al., 2019).

Finally, the consolidation of recurrent theoretical and methodological frameworks is observed, such as perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived risk, and signaling theory, as well as methodological approaches such as SEM and fsQCA, indicating analytical diversification in the study of determinants of consumer behavior (Kim and Park, 2013; Lu et al., 2016; Leong et al., 2020; Huang, 2016).

Overall, the map reveals a mature thematic structure organized around purchase intention and trust, with a recent expansion toward emerging phenomena such as live commerce, social influence, and the role of influencers, suggesting promising lines for future research.

The findings of this scoping review extend and update previous syntheses by demonstrating not only the substantial growth of social commerce research, but also a notable shift in its explanatory center of gravity. While earlier reviews primarily organized the field around broad platform categories, technology adoption factors, website features, or stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) frameworks (Busalim and Hussin, 2016; Han et al., 2018; Zhao et al., 2023), the present mapping—which integrates literature up to 2026 and combines bibliometric, collaboration, and keyword analyses—reveals a more nuanced transition. Foundational constructs such as trust and purchase intention remain central; however, they are increasingly articulated with psychologically granular mechanisms (e.g., FoMO, herd behavior, social proof, and parasocial relationships), synchronous and audiovisual platform affordances (live streaming and short-video formats), and emerging forms of relational value creation (Akram et al., 2021; Gan and Wang, 2017; Lin et al., 2019).

This interplay of theoretical continuity and progressive diversification represents the primary contribution of the present review.

In line with prior literature that has highlighted the central role of trust as a predictor of purchase behavior in social commerce (Hajli et al., 2017; Lin et al., 2019; Zhao et al., 2019; Tseng et al., 2025), recent studies continue to position this construct as a key mediating mechanism. For example, Al-Omoush and Shuhaiber (2026) integrate the “wisdom of the crowd” as an antecedent of trust and perceived value, expanding classical adoption models by incorporating collective dynamics characteristic of social platforms. Complementarily, Herzallah and Al-Sharafi (2025) delve into mechanisms for reducing seller uncertainty through pre-purchase signals, demonstrating that information quality and seller reputation remain fundamental pillars for trust formation. These findings reinforce the idea that, despite the technological sophistication of platforms, credibility evaluation processes remain anchored in social and informational quality signals.

In terms of socio-psychological processes, recent literature extends traditional social influence approaches toward more specific constructs. While earlier studies documented the impact of eWOM and consumer-to-consumer interaction on purchase intention (Charles and Kanani, 2025; John et al., 2025), more recent investigations introduce variables such as herd behavior (Chen et al., 2025) and fear of missing out (FoMO) (Khoa et al., 2025) to explain imitative behaviors and purchase urgency, particularly among young users of TikTok. These results suggest a transition from general social influence models toward finer-grained explanations of the cognitive and emotional mechanisms underlying decision-making in highly stimulating social environments.

Likewise, there is growing attention to impulse buying mediated by short-video platforms and live commerce. While previous works linked impulse purchasing to hedonic value and flow (Mashilo et al., 2025), recent studies such as Huang et al. (2025) and Thu et al. (2026) demonstrate that variables such as empathy, perceived enjoyment, and social proof signals in audiovisual content intensify the propensity for impulse buying. This empirical convergence suggests that the interactive architecture of platforms like TikTok and Douyin amplifies affective processes that reconfigure the classical determinants of purchase behavior in e-commerce.

In the realm of influencer marketing and value co-creation, current results expand approaches focused on engagement and brand–consumer relationships. Nibras et al. (2025) demonstrate that brand engagement and relationship quality drive co-creation processes in social commerce, aligning with the findings of Migkos et al. (2025), who emphasize the importance of authenticity and transparency of influencers in sustaining digital marketing effectiveness. These results suggest that persuasion in social commerce is not limited to content exposure but depends on sustained symbolic and emotional relationships over time.

Finally, the discussion reveals an expansion of the field toward specific sectoral and geographical contexts, such as the trade of aquaculture products in Bangladesh (Sharmin et al., 2025) or social commerce in emerging African economies (Charles and Kanani, 2025; Mashilo et al., 2025). These studies contrast with the strong historical concentration of the literature in East Asia and evidence a progressive contextual diversification. Nevertheless, a persistent gap remains in the representation of Latin America, reinforcing the need for future research examining how cultural, institutional, and socioeconomic factors moderate social commerce mechanisms in understudied regions.

A second contribution lies in the identification of persistent patterns in the methodological and geographical structure of the literature. The marked predominance of quantitative cross-sectional designs and structural equation modeling (SEM) has yielded a relatively robust understanding of the associations among trust, perceived value, social influence, and purchase intention. However, this approach offers limited insight into temporal dynamics, platform migration processes, repeated exposure effects, or underlying causal mechanisms. Future research would therefore benefit from greater methodological diversification, including longitudinal panel studies, field and platform-based experiments, digital trace analyses, qualitative process-oriented inquiries, and mixed-methods designs.

Likewise, the strong geographical concentration of research collaboration in Asia, North America, and Europe implies that constructs often presented as universal may in reality be significantly shaped by cultural values, institutional trust systems, payment infrastructures, platform regulations, and informal commercial practices. The relative underrepresentation of studies from Latin America and Africa thus constitutes not only an important coverage gap but also a substantial theoretical opportunity for advancing context-sensitive and culturally nuanced understandings of consumer behavior in social commerce.

Overall, the comparative evidence shows that the field of social commerce has transitioned from explanatory models centered on technological adoption and basic trust toward more integrative frameworks that incorporate emotions, collective dynamics, parasocial relationships, and platform architectures. This evolution poses the challenge of developing more holistic theoretical models and methodologies capable of capturing the dynamic complexity of consumer behavior in socially mediated digital ecosystems.

This review confirms that social commerce has evolved from explanations centered on technology adoption and purchase intention toward more integrative approaches in which trust, perceived value, social signals, emotional mechanisms, and platform dynamics converge. In recent studies, trust remains a structural axis, but it is explained with greater precision through antecedents such as the wisdom of the crowds and perceived value (Al-Omoush and Shuhaiber, 2026), as well as through seller uncertainty reduction mechanisms based on pre-purchase signals (Herzallah and Al-Sharafi, 2025).

Concurrently, social influence is shifting from general notions (eWOM, C2C interactions) toward more specific behavioral phenomena such as herd behavior (Chen et al., 2025) and fear of missing out (FoMO) (Khoa et al., 2025), especially in high-stimulation environments like TikTok. In addition, impulse buying is gaining centrality on short-video platforms, where social proof, enjoyment, and perceived usefulness intensify the urgency to purchase (Huang et al., 2025; Thu et al., 2026).

Taken together, the evidence portrays a research field that is simultaneously mature in its foundational constructs and still evolving in its newer mechanisms. The originality of this scoping review resides in its integrated mapping of the temporal, journal-level, geographical, collaborative, theoretical, and thematic dimensions of 472 studies published up to 2026. This comprehensive synthesis reveals that the current research frontier has moved beyond simply examining whether trust or social influence affects purchase intention. Instead, it increasingly focuses on how these core mechanisms are being reconfigured by platform architectures, synchronous audiovisual interactions, collective behavioral cues, emotional urgency, and culturally embedded forms of digital commerce.

Notwithstanding this progress, persistent regional gaps and the continued dominance of cross-sectional quantitative designs remain significant constraints on the generalizability and depth of existing knowledge.

Theoretical implications

The findings of this review reinforce the central role of trust as a foundational construct in social commerce while highlighting increasing differentiation in its antecedents. Trust is now more frequently explained through a multifaceted array of collective information, seller signals, reputation mechanisms, perceived value, social presence, and platform-specific cues, moving beyond its treatment as a single undifferentiated predictor. These insights suggest that future models should explicitly distinguish between the objects and sources of trust and systematically examine how social and informational signals interact across diverse platform contexts (Al-Omoush and Shuhaiber, 2026; Herzallah and Al-Sharafi, 2025).

The review further underscores the need for greater theoretical granularity regarding social influence. Traditional broad categories such as electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) or general social influence are increasingly supplemented by more specific mechanisms, including imitation, herd behavior, social proof, fear of missing out (FoMO), parasocial relationships, and responsiveness to collective cues (Chen et al., 2025; Khoa et al., 2025). These developments point toward the value of integrating cognitive and affective pathways, particularly in short-video and live-commerce environments, where enjoyment, empathy, perceived usefulness, urgency, and real-time interaction often operate concurrently. In this regard, frameworks such as S-O-R and the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) may prove most productive when employed as integrative architectures rather than standalone explanatory templates.

Finally, the evidence expands the unit of analysis beyond isolated individual purchase decisions. Constructs such as engagement, relationship quality, community interaction, and value co-creation suggest that social commerce generates value within relational ecosystems in which consumers simultaneously act as reviewers, content creators, recommenders, and active participants in brand communities (Migkos et al., 2025; Nibras et al., 2025). From a theoretical standpoint, this calls for models that bridge individual psychological mechanisms with networked and platform-level processes, while explicitly testing the extent to which these relationships are moderated by cultural and institutional contexts.

Practical implications

For platforms and practitioners, the findings underscore that reducing consumer uncertainty remains a central managerial imperative. Providing comprehensive product information, verifiable reviews, strong seller reputation signals, transparent return policies, traceability features, and prompt responses to frequently asked questions can significantly enhance credibility and facilitate trust formation (Herzallah and Al-Sharafi, 2025). In live streaming and short-video environments, these informational cues should be thoughtfully integrated with interactive features that enable consumers to pose questions, observe peer reactions, and evaluate products without compromising visibility of essential product details.

Content and marketing strategies should also carefully differentiate between genuine engagement and manipulative pressure. While social proof, enjoyment, empathy, and perceived usefulness can effectively heighten purchase urgency on platforms such as TikTok and Douyin (Huang et al., 2025; Thu et al., 2026), the same mechanisms risk becoming coercive when paired with artificial scarcity or deceptive urgency tactics. Responsible social commerce practices therefore demand transparent disclosure, effective moderation of user-generated content, verifiable testimonials, and judicious application of FoMO-based appeals—particularly in campaigns targeting younger audiences (Khoa et al., 2025).

Finally, community and market contexts should guide strategic implementation. Consumer-to-consumer interactions can enhance purchase intentions by building trust (John et al., 2025), supporting the development of Q&A functionalities, community reputation systems, and high-quality reviews. Nevertheless, strategies should not be applied uniformly across regions. Substantial differences in cultural values, security expectations, payment infrastructures, platform adoption patterns, and informal commercial practices necessitate localized adaptation of segmentation and messaging approaches. This is especially critical in emerging markets and underrepresented regions, where social commerce is often widespread in practice yet remains significantly understudied in indexed academic literature.