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

Social commerce has quietly become the battleground where the future of retail is decided. A new scoping review published in Frontiers in Human Dynamics maps how researchers have studied consumer behavior in this rapidly evolving space, synthesizing evidence from 472 studies published between 2010 and 2026. The review, led by Kevin Andrés Alvarado-Gaibor of Universidad Estatal de Milagro in Ecuador, offers the most comprehensive picture to date of a field that has grown explosively since 2019, when live commerce and short-video platforms began transforming how people shop online.

The numbers tell a striking story. Social commerce integrates transactional capabilities directly with social interaction, user-generated content, and platform-driven influence mechanisms, blurring the line between browsing a feed and completing a purchase. The review reveals sustained growth in the literature, particularly after 2019, but also exposes a strong methodological monoculture: quantitative cross-sectional designs and structural equation modeling dominate the field, with researchers repeatedly measuring the same core constructs of trust, perceived value, purchase intention, and social influence.

Yet the review also documents an emerging wave of psychologically nuanced research streams. Recent studies increasingly examine herd behavior, fear of missing out (FoMO), social proof, influencer-consumer relationships, live commerce, and short-video environments. This shift represents a move away from early technology-adoption and generalized trust models toward more platform-sensitive explanations of consumer decision-making that account for emotional urgency, collective dynamics, and the specific affordances of TikTok-style platforms.

Perhaps the most sobering finding concerns global knowledge production. The review highlights a pronounced asymmetry, with substantial contributions from Asia, North America, and Europe contrasted by comparatively limited representation from Latin America and Africa. This geographic imbalance matters because consumer behavior in social commerce is deeply shaped by cultural context, platform ecosystems, and informal commercial practices that vary enormously across regions.

The review identifies key priorities for future scholarship, including greater theoretical integration, methodological diversification, longitudinal and comparative designs, and expanded research in underrepresented regions. As social commerce continues to evolve with AI-driven recommendations and immersive shopping experiences, understanding how consumers decide what to buy—and why—remains one of the most consequential questions in digital commerce research.

The methodological profile that emerges from the review deserves closer scrutiny, because it shapes what the field can and cannot claim to know. Structural equation modeling is a powerful tool for testing whether hypothesized relationships among latent constructs—say, whether social influence raises purchase intention indirectly by first boosting perceived value—hold together in survey data collected from a sample of consumers at a single point in time. But cross-sectional designs capture a snapshot, not a process. Consumer behavior in social commerce unfolds dynamically: trust in a livestream host may build over minutes of watching, herd behavior may spike during a flash sale, and FoMO-driven purchases may be followed by regret or returns. A literature dominated by one-time surveys and variance-based modeling is well equipped to map the architecture of attitudes and intentions, yet poorly equipped to trace how those states form, decay, or interact with platform features over time. This is precisely why the review’s call for longitudinal and comparative designs is not a routine methodological recommendation but a structural necessity for the field’s next phase of maturity.

The dominance of a small set of core constructs also has a self-reinforcing quality. Trust, perceived value, purchase intention, and social influence are well-established, psychometrically validated constructs, which makes them attractive choices for researchers designing studies and for journals evaluating them. The result is a citation and publication ecosystem in which incremental extensions—adding a moderator, testing a new platform, replicating a model in another country—are rewarded, while riskier conceptual innovation may struggle for traction. The emerging streams the review identifies, including herd behavior, social proof, and influencer-consumer relationships, suggest that researchers are beginning to push beyond this comfort zone, drawing on social psychology and behavioral economics to capture phenomena that traditional adoption models were never designed to explain.

The theoretical evolution the review traces is itself instructive. Early work in the field leaned heavily on technology-adoption frameworks, which treat the consumer’s decision as a function of perceived usefulness, ease of use, and similar cognitive appraisals. Such models made sense when social commerce was essentially e-commerce with social features bolted on. But as platforms evolved into environments where entertainment, social connection, and commerce are inseparable, the explanatory center of gravity shifted. The Stimulus–Organism–Response tradition, which frames platform features as environmental stimuli that trigger internal psychological states leading to behavioral responses, has become a widely used scaffold precisely because it accommodates immersion, social presence, and perceived enjoyment alongside more conventional predictors. This trajectory—from adoption logic to experience logic—mirrors the transformation of the platforms themselves.

The geographic asymmetry documented in the review carries implications beyond mere representation. Research on consumer behavior is not culturally neutral: constructs like trust operate differently in high-context societies where interpersonal relationships carry commercial weight than in markets where institutional and platform-mediated signals dominate. Findings about tie strength in messaging-based commerce, for example, may not generalize cleanly across regions with different communication norms. When the bulk of evidence comes from a handful of markets, the field risks building a theoretical consensus that reflects the platform ecosystems and consumer cultures of those markets rather than the full global diversity of social commerce practice. Latin America and Africa are not simply underrepresented; they host distinctive commercial phenomena, including heavy reliance on messaging apps for informal selling, that could enrich and challenge existing theory if studied on their own terms.

The rise of live commerce as a research topic illustrates how quickly the empirical landscape can shift. Livestream shopping combines audiovisual persuasion, real-time interaction, scarcity cues, and parasocial relationships between hosts and viewers, creating a persuasion environment with few offline parallels. Studies cited in the review show that broadcasters’ influence tactics affect purchase intention through approach-avoidance motivations, and that presenters’ attributes and persuasive strategies matter—findings that would have been difficult to anticipate within earlier adoption-oriented frameworks. Similarly, the migration of promotional content into private messaging channels demonstrates that social commerce is not confined to public feeds; it penetrates interpersonal communication spaces where credibility judgments depend on who is speaking, not just what is said.

The review’s attention to eWOM evolution also highlights a broader challenge for consumers and regulators alike. As word-of-mouth migrates from textual reviews to short videos, virtual influencers, and immersive environments, the cues consumers use to assess credibility become harder to evaluate. A polished short video may be indistinguishable from organic content; a virtual influencer may command parasocial trust without any underlying human experience of the product. Understanding how credibility and persuasion operate in these formats is not only an academic question but a practical one for consumer protection and platform governance.

Finally, the thematic expansion toward sustainable consumption and AI-driven personalization signals where the field is heading. Social commerce is increasingly a channel through which pro-environmental norms and identities are communicated, and increasingly a testing ground for algorithmic personalization that shapes what consumers see and, by extension, what they want. Both directions raise questions that cross-sectional surveys of purchase intention cannot fully answer: whether personalized recommendations create genuine value or manipulative pressure, and whether sustainability messaging translates into durable behavior change. The review’s mapping of the field thus serves as both a record of where social commerce research has been and a benchmark against which its next decade of development can be measured.

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

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

Article References: Alvarado-Gaibor, K. A., Espinoza-Solís, E. J., Peñaherrera-Larenas, M. F., Guevara-Piedra, W., Lovato-Torres, S., & Peralta-Gamboa, D. A. (2026). Consumer behavior in social commerce: a scoping review of the scientific literature. Frontiers in Human Dynamics, 8, Article 1819540. https://doi.org/10.3389/fhumd.2026.1819540

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fhumd.2026.1819540

Keywords: Consumer, behavior, social, commerce, scoping, review, scientific, literature, scientific research