The role of social commerce for enhancing consumers’ involvement in the cross-border product: Evidence from SEM and ANN based on MOA framework

Although cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has experienced rapid development, severe issues remain, including information asymmetry and uncertainty. Social commerce platforms have emerged to provide consumers with new approaches to solving these issues and enabling shopping decisions. However, there is still a dearth of knowledge about the underlying mechanism that explains why and how CBEC consumers employ social commerce platforms to facilitate information processing. To address this critical issue, we employed SEM and ANN analytical approaches to examine the research model developed from the motivation-opportunity-ability (MOA) framework. The results revealed associations between the identified motivational factors (information seeking, serendipity, relaxation, and symbolic motivation), opportunity factors (time availability, platform empowerment, and electronic Word-of-Mouth), the ability factor (self-efficacy), involvement, and purchase intentions. In addition, an importance ranking of the most critical drivers of consumers’ shopping decisions was derived from various antecedents.