Determinants of Consumer Purchase Intention on Community E-Commerce Platforms: A Stimulus-Organism-Response Analysis of a Collectivist Developing Market

Abstract

Community e-commerce, where buying is embedded in social interaction, peer discussion, and influencer endorsement, has become one of the fastest growing retail channels in emerging economies. Yet the psychological process that converts social exposure into a decision to buy remains thinly studied outside Western and East Asian settings. Drawing on the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, this study treats influencer credibility, social media content quality, and online community trust as social stimuli, perceived value as the organism, and purchase intention as the response, and it tests whether perceived value mediates each stimulus-to-intention relationship. Survey data were gathered from 386 active community e-commerce users aged 25 to 40 in Pakistan and analysed with partial least squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) using 5,000 bootstrap resamples in SmartPLS 4. All seven hypotheses were supported. Influencer credibility exerted the strongest effect on perceived value, ahead of online community trust and content quality, and perceived value was in turn the strongest single predictor of purchase intention. Perceived value partially transmitted the effect of each stimulus; because the direct paths remained significant, the mediation was complementary rather than full. The model accounted for meaningful variance in perceived value (R² = 0.366) and purchase intention (R² = 0.416). The study extends the SOR framework to a collectivist developing market, positions perceived value as a genuine but non-exclusive channel between social cues and intention, and offers direction for influencer selection, content strategy, and community trust infrastructure. Psychometric limitations of the shortened measures are acknowledged and addressed.

Keywords: community e-commerce; influencer credibility; social media content quality; online community trust; perceived value; purchase intention; Stimulus-Organism-Response model; PLS-SEM; Pakistan