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社群商務的遊戲化：

遊戲和社群元素對參與程度和購買意願的驅策

Gamification in social commerce:

when game and social elements

drive engagement and purchase intention

ABSTRACT

Although topics of gamification and social commerce attract high interest from

scholars, their mix impact on customer engagement has not been investigated. This research

aims to identify the impact of game and social elements on customer meaningful

engagement. First, this study implements a netnography research to explore the game

elements, social elements and specific behaviors of customers through online discussion.

Second, this study proposes a research framework based on the results of netnography

analysis and related literature. The findings show that game elements (i.e., challenges,

collaboration) and social elements (i.e., social support, social presence) positively influence

customer meaningful engagement (i.e., cognitive absorption, stickiness and purchasing

intention) through interactivity.

Keywords: meaningful engagement, gamification, social commerce, netnography

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1 Research Background and Motivation

Social commerce is a new stream and subset of e-commerce, which integrate social

communication functions with e-commerce (Z. Huang & Benyoucef, 2013; Liang, Ho, Li,

& Turban, 2011). Social commerce platforms can be classified into two groups: traditional

e-commerce with social communication tool integration (e.g., Amazon with Spark, Shopee,

Lazada) and social media with commerce functions (e.g., Facebook marketplace, Pinterest,

Instagram). The question for the traditional e-commerce platforms is how to compete and

win customer engagement in the harsh competition of social commerce industry. Mobile

application and gamification can be a solution for existing social commerce businesses.

Regarding the mobile e-commerce, statistics of eMarketer research 2018 shows that a total

mobile e-commerce sale 2018 was 1.80 trillion USD, accounted for 63.5% of total

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e-commerce (eMarketer, 2018). This number is estimated to reach 2.32 trillion USD in

2019. In another report of Activision Blizzard Media in 2018, three most-popular apps in a

mobile phone are social media (67%), shopping apps (56%) and game/music apps (50%).

This report also emphasized the huge volume market of mobile game with more than two

billion users and an estimated revenue of $148.1 billion in 2019. Comparing with

non-gamers, mobile gamers are more purchase influencers, with two-thirds having some

influence on the purchasing decisions of their friends, family, or colleagues. A large number

of social commerce platforms have applied the game design in their business to attract

customer engagement. They create the mix platform of three most-popular activities

(shopping, social communication, and game). For example, Amazon Spark also provides

gamification via review and referral system in platforms. The more people shop, review, or

interact with the platforms, the more they will receive extra benefits such as discount or

rewards. Another example is Alibaba, the biggest Asia e-commerce. The business employed

gamification on a deep level referred to as “shoppertainment” (shopper plus entertainment).

On the event of Chinese 11.11, which is equivalent to Black Friday in the U.S., Alibaba

implements various ways of gamification, e.g., flash sales purchases, interactive television,

and rewards.

1.2 Research Gaps

This research aims to fulfil several gaps. First, few studies explore gamification in

social commerce context. Gamification in social commerce context seems to be new

phenomena in both academics and practice due to the rapid growth of technology and

innovation. Figure 1 shows the number of published papers in Google Scholar from 2009 to

June of 2019. The keywords include e-commerce, social commerce, gamification and mix

of those keywords. E-commerce and social commerce have been receiving high popularity

in academics for prolonged periods. However, both seem to be gradually declined and out of

academic’s interest. Gamification, in contrast, is attracting the interest of scholars.

Gamification in education area is covered nearly seventy percent of the total number of

gamifications in Google Scholar search results. Thus, this exhibits the desideratum for

gamification to be explored and eye-catching for the scholar.

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* as of June of 2019

Figure 1 Google Scholar Search Result During 2009 – 2019

Source: Author summarization from Google Scholar (June 2019)

Second, the relationship between gamification, purchase intention and other

meaningful engagement has not been fully understood yet. Liu, Santhanam, and Webster

(2017) proposed a framework for game design in information systems, which helps to

enhance meaningful engagement or dual outcomes. The authors settled several research

questions and called for future research on gamification. One of the main questions

mentioned which game elements lead to a specific type of outcomes.

Third, there is plenty of room to improve synchronization of theory and

implementation. Rapp, Hopfgartner, Hamari, Linehan, and Cena (2018) indicated that the

disconnection between practical and theoretical side is a major issue of gamification studies

due to the unclear on empirical validity data. Moreover, most existing studies avoid

exploring the game design elements and real practice, which has guaranteed evidence on

how to create meaningful, engaging experiences through game design.

1.3 Research Questions

Two research questions are presented as follows: (i) What game elements and social

elements influence user behavior (i.e., dual meaningful engagement) in the context of

gamified social commerce? and (ii) Does gamification cause any negative effects on the

user’s meaningful engagement, such as purchase intention?

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2. LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Social Commerce

Social commerce refers to the combination of e-commerce and social media (Busalim,

2016; Liang et al., 2011; Zhou, Zhang, & Zimmermann, 2013). There are two types of

social commerce. First, existing e-commerce businesses can take advantage of social

networking capabilities to encourage users to interact with each other and generate their

contents (Li & Ku, 2018). Second, social media with e-commerce function integration is

another definition of social commerce. Users can share experience, data, opinion on

products, and services via this new platform on the internet (Baethge, Klier, & Klier, 2016).

Moreover, social features encourage users to actively build community, generate content

(Li, 2017), sell products and services (Z. Huang & Benyoucef, 2015) and broaden

undiscovered market (Hargadon & Bechky, 2006).

Social commerce can be differentiated from traditional e-commerce (or simply referred

as e-commerce) in several aspects such as the business objective, design structure, customer

relationship and system interaction (Busalim, 2016; Z. Huang & Benyoucef, 2013; K. Z.

Zhang & Benyoucef, 2016). First, regarding business objective, e-commerce targets to

selling and revenue (Shen, 2012) while social commerce additionally aims to create

community and interactivity (Zhou et al., 2013). Second, an e-commerce site is designed

toward product orientation, whereas a social commerce site is social- and customer-oriented

(Liang & Turban, 2011). Thus, e-commerce design structure would be based on purchasing

behavior while social commerce design structure requires an area for user-user interaction.

Third, e-commerce customers commonly interact individually and independently with the

system (user-system interaction) or another customer (user-user interaction). However, in

social commerce, all the interaction is relating to communities, e.g., writing reviews, rating

others’ reviews, and chatting with other users (Kim & Srivastava, 2007). In other words,

social commerce supports both user-system interaction and user-user.

2.2 Gamification in Social Commerce

The mobile game attracts an increasingly a number of users and becomes a huge

industry because of its ubiquity, impulsivity, and disinhibition (Jung, Bapna, Ramaprasad, &

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Umyarov, 2019). Ubiquity refers to the situation that users can access the game anywhere

and anytime. Impulsivity relates to the mobile characteristic, which can enable the

impulsive behavior. Disinhibition means that users feel relaxed and self-represent as the

mobile device provides personal space.

The application of game in other industries, or gamification, therefore, becomes

popular in recent years. Gamification refers to “the use of game design elements in

non-game contexts” (Deterding, Sicart, Nacke, O'Hara, & Dixon, 2011). Mekler,

Brühlmann, Opwis, and Tuch (2013) expanded as “the use of game design elements (points,

leaderboards, and badges) in non-game contexts help to promote user engagement.” Table 1

summaries recent studies on gamification in business and management. There are several

noting points. First, most of the empirical gamification studies worked on the context of

education, marketing, organization. Gamification in the context of social commerce is

under-researched. Second, there is still a lack of a coherent framework to understand the

influence of game elements to the user behavior. Liu et al. (2017) suggested a research

framework, in which, the interactions (user-user, user-system, and system-user interactions)

mediate the impacts of game elements on meaningful engagements. However, this

framework with several new constructs needs to be confirmed by further empirical

researches.

This study, therefore, aims to empirical test the foundation framework of Liu et al.

(2017), and additionally, explore the mix impact of game elements and social elements to

the customer meaningful engagement in the specific context of social commerce. Finally,

game elements are abundant with different impacts on customer behavior. The usage of

which elements follows the main objectives of the practitioners. For example, game

elements can be rewards, challenges, tasks, badges, leaderboard in the context of brand and

advertising (Harwood & Garry, 2015; Hwang & Choi, 2019), challenge, enjoyment, goal,

leader board in the context of education (Aparicio, Oliveira, Bacao, & Painho, 2019;

Landers, Bauer, & Callan, 2017), challenge, competition, reward, status, self-expression in

the context of workplace and organization (Friedrich, Becker, Kramer, Wirth, & Schneider,

2019; Suh, Cheung, Ahuja, & Wagner, 2017).

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Table 1 Selected recent literature on gamification in business and management

Literature Review article

Source Objectives and main findings

Liu et al.

(2017)

- Review the concepts of gamification in the IS context and actual case studies.

- Point out the gaps from literature and practice.

- Propose a framework of gamification design: interactions as the central constructs, which mediate the impacts of game elements to meaningful engagements.

- Propose several research questions

Koivisto and

Hamari (2019)

- Review 819 studies on gamification.

- Majority of studies worked on gamification in the context of education, health and crowdsourcing.

- Common game elements include points, badges and leader boards.

- Propose 15 future research directions for gamification in IS field.

Empirical studies

Source Context Independent variables Dependent variables Theory Method

C.-K. Huang,

Chen, and Liu

(2019)

Application Social value, enjoyment value, confirmation,

perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, regret

satisfaction, habit

Discontinue intention The expectation-confirmation model (ECM)

and the technology acceptance model

(TAM)

Online survey

Morschheuser,

Hamari, and

Maedche (2018)

Application

Competitive, cooperative, inter-team competitive

gamification, goal, feedback, competition, perceive

usefulness, perceive enjoyment

System usage, engagement

with the gamification feature,

willingness to recommend

Social interdependence theory,

self-determination theory, technology

adoption, consumption theory

Field experiment

Hwang and

Choi (2019)

Brand Reward types (self-oriented rewards and altruistic

rewards), Gamified loyalty program (have and not

have), playfulness, attitude

Consumer loyalty,

participation intention, app

download intention

Social exchange theory and flow theory Experiment and

online survey

Harwood and

Garry (2015)

Brand Challenge, tasks, rewards, badge, leaderboard, win

condition

Intrinsic/extrinsic reward,

relationship, loyalty,

Mentioned theories: Relational marketing

theory, confirmation theory, social

Netnography

and participant

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subversion cognitive theory, flow theory observation

Aparicio et al.

(2019)

Education Information quality, systems quality, service quality,

user satisfaction, gamification (enjoyment, challenge)

Individual impact,

organizational impact

Information system (IS) theory, D&M

model

Online survey

Landers et al.

(2017)

Education Goal conditions, leaderboard, goal commitment Performance Goal-setting theory, motivational theories Online

experiment

Xi and Hamari

(2019)

Brand Achievement, immersion and social gamification The satisfaction of

competence, autonomy and

relatedness needs

Self-determination theory Experiment and

online survey

Shukla and

Drennan

(2018)

Online

community

Group-level (i.e. community influences) and

individual-level variables (intrinsic and extrinsic

motivations)

Purchase Intention Social network theory, social influence

theory and Kohler’s motivational gains

effects theory

Online survey

Friedrich et al.

(2019)

Organization Challenge, competition, feedback, performance

graphs, rewards, status

Performance Self-determination theory Systematic

literature review

Goh and Ping

(2014)

Advertisement Interactivity, Fit, Expectancy Attitude toward advergame,

Attitude toward brand,

Purchase intention

Transportation theory Experiment

Suh et al.

(2017)

Workplace Reward affordance, Status affordance, Competition

affordance, Self-expression affordance

Flow experience, Aesthetic

experience, Continuance

intention to use

Affective affordances model Survey

Chia-Lin Hsu

and Chen

(2018)

Brand The experience of gamification marketing activities

(GMAs), Hedonic value, Utilitarian value

Satisfaction, Brand love,

Brand loyalty, Positive WOM,

Resistance to negative

information

Exchange theory Survey based on

a bookstore

platform

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To fulfil those literature gaps, this study implements a netnography study with

qualitative data analysis explore the gamification phenomenon in the context of social

commerce. The netnography study can help to (i) identify which game elements, social

elements, and customer behaviors in the context of social commerce, (ii) understand the

insights of the relationship among those constructs, and (iii) explore other factors that might

influence the experience of gaming customers. Additionally, a research model is developed

on the framework of Liu et al. (2017) and results from the qualitative study. The foundation

framework of Liu et al. (2017) is extended with social constructs and can be confirmed by

empirical data in future research.

3. METHOD

3.1 Netnography Approach

Kozinets (2002) stated that “netnography or ethnography on the Internet, is a new

qualitative research methodology that adapts ethnographic research techniques to study the

cultures and communities that are emerging through computer-mediated communications.”

It is online research with a naturalistic method that offers an understanding on occurring

behaviors like social interaction on consumer discussions by observing and/or participating

in communications on publicly available online forums in contemporary digital

communications contexts. Thus, this can be implied that the data is completely unobtrusive,

more naturalistic than interviews or focus group. In addition, it is a simpler, faster and lower

cost than the original ethnography method (Hollebeek, Juric, & Tang, 2017).

3.2 Data Collection and Analysis

Kozinets (2010) proposed two issues for the netnography approach: data sources and

data appropriation, and data analysis with the balance of an in-depth cultural understanding.

In this study, Lazada and Shopee platforms are selected due to the wide popularity, data

accessibility, frequency and duration of gamification campaign. Statistics of iPrice (2019)

show the traffics of both platforms in 6 south-eastern Asian countries (Thailand, Vietnam,

Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, and Singapore), which rank as the first and second highest

e-commerce platforms in those countries. Data is collected from discussion forums and

social media (i.e., Twitter) using 6 keywords(“Lazgame”; “LazadaSlashIt”;

“Lazada7BirthdaypartyTH”; “ShopeeSlice”; “ShopeeShake”; “ShopeeShakeShake”). The

posted time that the researcher tracked to pull the data out is from June 1, 2018 to April 30,

2019 (10 months period). The time is chosen due to big campaign promotions (e.g., 6.6

Midyear Sales, 9.9 Super shopping day, 11.11 Black Friday and so on), when the platforms

launch games to promote customer attention. This initial search resulted in a database of

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359 discussion posts and 3,575 tweets. After that, all unmeaningful data such as

untranslated languages, only link sharing, only hashtag sharing, only link sharing with

instant caption is screened out as “data cleaning process”. Eventually, we identified 23

topics with a total of 347 comments including topics in the forum, whilst identified 232

tweets with a total of 308 tweets including both initiating tweets and reply tweets on

Twitter. The total of 655 items will be used for further analysis.

Data analysis follows the process of open-axial-selective coding, which is proposed

grounded theory (J. Corbin, Strauss, & Strauss, 2014; J. M. Corbin & Strauss, 1990). The

open or free coding helps to identify the first order constructs, whereas the axial coding

groups them into larger categories. The selective coding then identifies the relationship

between big categories. To ensure the validity of the coding process, many criteria are set as

follows: First, the data was translated from Thai language to English language by two

professional translators and has been checked by one native researcher before the main

analysis. Second, a researcher freely coded all the messages and propose the list of

first-order constructs. The second researcher reviewed the literature and composed a code

with a list of academic constructs. Then two researchers worked together to match the free

codes with academic constructs and their definitions. A final code with a unique definition

of all constructs was settled for the next step. Third, two researchers worked independently

on the same data set based on the mutual understanding of constructs. After finishing, two

researchers compared the results, assessed the reliability, and launched the results.

4. RESULTS

4.1 Reliability assessment

To assess the reliability, Cohen's kappa coefficient (κ) (Cohen, 1960) which measure

intercoder reliability coefficients and agreement for qualitative items was applied. The

Kappa score is 0.46 and 0.47 for the forum and Twitter respectively (Figure 2), indicating

that the quality of the annotation and presented schema is substantially “fair to moderate”

inter-annotator agreement (Banerjee, Capozzoli, McSweeney, & Sinha, 1999). The

moderate score could occur due to the nature of the tweets (unstructured, abbreviated

words). Anzovino, Fersini, and Rosso (2018) in their study “Automatic identification and

classification of misogynistic language on twitter” mentioned that “considering only this

statistic is not appropriate when the prevalence of a given response is very high or very low

in a specific class. In this case, the value of kappa may indicate a low level of reliability

even with a high observed proportion of agreement.” Nobata, Tetreault, Thomas, Mehdad,

and Chang (2016) worked on a forum data set (Yahoo!, Finance and News) and showed that

their Fleiss’s Kappa dropped from 0.843 to 0.456 where multiple subcategories can be

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labeled for a comment. This effect might possibly affect to Cohen’s Kappa. Therefore, the

reliability index of this study is acceptable.

Figure 2. Inter-Annotator Agreement (Kappa) Results on MAXQDA

Figure 3. Examples of Open Coding on MAXQDA

The axial coding process put the 84 sub-labels into 30 categories. Relating categories

are recognized and rearranged in a hierarchical form with the creation of subcategories. The

process will give a hint view on the answer of research purpose as content reveals some

relationships and evidence to support research questions. Finally, selective coding to divest

and develop on a number of principal categories and related subcategories. This procedure

helps to identify significant categories, the relationship among categories and category

function as a whole system, resulting in a set of 7 categories with 23 sub-categories for

gamification in social commerce to be further explored.

4.2 Game elements

The data analysis reveals several relating gamification elements such as goals, rewards,

dynamic rewards, time pressure, time limitation, leaderboard, status. However, only

saturated constructs are used to report and be analyzed in the next study. The saturation

means the situation when constructs become well developed and understood and the

relationship among constructs have been verified (J. M. Corbin & Strauss, 1990). The valid

constructs are rewards (164 items), challenges (57 items), and collaboration (186 items).

Table 2 Game elements

Rewards

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“the use of rapid indications of success through virtual and monetary rewards.” (Conaway & Garay,

2014)

“The first time I got this high prize, usually less than a baht.”

“Oops. Thousands of coins are waiting for us.”

“Come on people, get another bonus of 10% up to 90%.”

“Come on Shopee, you have to increase more prize for the next round.”

“This round the reward is up to 200,000 coins”

“I got 9,999 coins at 9 am this morning”

“they said that the highest prize was up to 19,999 coins”

“on 11.11 campaign, it has 11 questions we got 800 coins”

“Another thing I like is to collect the Shopee coins.”

Challenges

“the degree to which individuals find it difficult to cope with specific tasks involved” (Shin, 2006)

“Just now I answered the question in the Shopee app. The question was very difficult with more than

50,000 responses. 200 people got the right answer, and each got 4000 coins”

“The questions are really difficult, I tried to find clues from the question”

“Shake as strongest as I have ever done in life for the final round of this campaign”

“This arm almost dropped the phone, almost hitting my head. I still have not reached -1.”

“My team never pass the 3rd level.”

“During this time, it's kinda hard to find people to join the group.”

“I never reach level 8 yet.”

Collaboration

Collaboration or teammates (Sailer, Hense, Mayr, & Mandl, 2017), cooperation (Werbach & Hunter,

2012), means the introduction of teams, i.e. by “creating defined groups of players that work together

towards a shared objective.” (Sailer et al., 2017)

“Play together would have added a lot of rewards.”

“More people, more rewards”

“Play Lazada Slash? Come join me https://line.me/R/ti/g/A5rPNTVnxC”

“Create a group to cooperate with your friends.”

“And they had to work together as a team helping each other in order to get all the right answers.”

“next time I invite, you guys have to come to join my group, ok?”

“Need 6 more! now has 4.”

“Good teamwork! This team is a very quality team, who help each other, shake well ~~~~.”

“Do you want to join us? Our group left 4 spaces only!”

“Finding friends to play Shopee shake shake! Is anyone interested? Today the reward is double X2.

Finding friends to the party, now I have only 2, me and another friend.”

4.3 Social elements

The data analysis reveals several relating social commerce elements such as

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collaboration, social comparison, social influence, emotion support, information support,

knowledge sharing, building relationship, creating own community. Subsequent data

analysis is implemented. Valid principles are listed with supporting quotes as below table.

They include social presence (59 items), information support (95 items), and emotion

support (61 items).

Table 3 Social elements

Social Presence

“The perceived sense of how personal, warm, intimate, sociable, or sensitive the interactions are in

the social commerce environment” (H. Zhang, Lu, Gupta, & Zhao, 2014)

“At first I thought that I was alone. With a ton of friends, I feel relaxed now”

“This is so boring; I was waiting to play. When I check the #hashtag, seem like I got many friends

here 😂.”

“@porntanat_aom Let exchange LINE account?”

“I can play this alone, but more people are more fun!”

“I also got the same issue with you.”

“I also feel the same way!”

“I was one of the thousands of people who were playing the game in the morning of 09/09/2018”

“I believe there are hundreds of thousands of people participated in this event.”

Information Support

“The perceived sense of the information assistance obtained from the interactions in the social

commerce environment” (H. Zhang et al., 2014)

“Shake Left 2 times, shake right 2 times... Then let the time run out. You will get coins more than

shaking hard.”

“There is a chance that a component might come loose. You have to hold it tight”

“I even asked the Samsung Service Center, they said it's ok to shake the phone. Do not worry.”

“However, people who win this time will get more coins than before. The last time when I won 26

times, I got just 800 coins because there were fewer people won a big prize round… Today, if you

can beat all 5 rounds you get almost 1,500 coins.”

“I have observed SHopee Shake Shake game for a long time. After the game ended for around 30

minutes, there will be tons of coins give away, so even Shopee say that they give a lot, maybe they

give only a few.”

“CEO Lazada is suddenly changed. Hopefully, next year will be better.”

“Yes, usually around 6-7 per round.”

“Ok, when it's almost the time to play. I will post the link here again.”

Emotion Support

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“The perceived sense of the emotional concerns obtained from the interactions in the social

commerce environment” (H. Zhang et al., 2014)

“Keep cool. Calm down”

“Never give up !!”

“Next time you will get it”

“Keep it up!”

“Seem like everyone will face the same issues. Because the total coins on the system are not

decreased at all.”

“15-3 This I strongly agree with you.”

“I understand that many people feel horrible”

“If it were me, I will return all the same. But I never used Shopee anyways.”

“I feel empathy for people who got the correct answer but could not send it and the app automatically

shut down.”

“I faced this problem too.”

“Don’t worry about it too much, it’s just for fun. If you win then great if not, then let’s move on”

4.4 Interactivity

The data analysis reveals several contexts for interactivity principles. Users commonly

ask others to join the group, share games to friends, tag friends, invite others to the

community and so on. Valid principles are listed with supporting quotes as below table. The

frequencies are 107 items of interactivity among users and 27 items of user-system

interactivity. See Table 4.

Table 4 Interactivity

Interactivity

(User-System)

Shopee Please check, when is the next round? 17:00 or 19:0o? Why It shows that 19.00?”

“@ShopeeTH”

“Please show your responsibility! @ShopeeTH”

“19.20. PM, Shopee officers called to apologize for the mistake.”

“Mister Shopee, have you not read the post? It doesn’t say there is a problem with the app.”

“Today cannot play! @ShopeeTH”

Interactivity

(User-User)

Interactivity refers to the extent to which users can interact with other users (user-user) or platforms

(user-system) in the same context. (adapted from Goh & Ping, 2014)

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“I have captured the evidence to warn people about this if you want to see the evidence email me at

ruchcpram@gmail.com”

“Has anyone had the same problem?”

“Did anyone get the special prize from shake event?”

“How to get a high score in Shopee slice game?”

“My coins have disappeared, where can I get it back?”

“I have a question. What about if we play SLASH but it's not till the end of the game, do we need to

pay full price? And why they need our cellphone number?”

“Yes, I just wanna tell you.”

“Lately I often see these 2 websites continuously launch the game. I don’t play it but a lot of friends

do. Why are so many people playing it? Let’s share”

“@chabooae Shall we 😁”

“Anyone is waiting to play the last round?”

“Anyone get the reward less than mine?”

“@ddreamsuda @agape_sp @ obso95 @prinatnicha”

“@DevilBZ88 Nice! Will you also play another shake round on5 pm say ???”

4.5 Cognitive Absorption Principles.

The data analysis reveals several codes relating to cognitive absorption such as

enjoyment, curiosity, immersion, time distortion. Valid principles are listed with supporting

quotes as below table.

Table 5 Cognitive absorption dimensions

Curiosity

Curiosity is an arousal experience.(Agarwal & Karahanna, 2000)

“I, as a customer, was curious about the situation. So, I called the Call Center to ask for more detail.”

“The questions are why make a campaign but not giving out coins.”

“Since they did not know how many coins were allotted”

“Is the Shopee quiz cheating?”

“The question about how much a wagon of rice weighs, I answered 1,000 according to Google but

the team revealed it was 1,500 which really surprised me.”

Immersion

Immersion is the experience of deep engagement and ignorance of the surrounded environment

(Agarwal & Karahanna, 2000).

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“Have you ever been like this?

Playing Shopee Shake, and we have to shake to get the coins, right? So, I shake till my head is

strongly shaking. Then somebody walked past me and asked: what are you doing?

OMG! I suddenly stop, shocked and laughed out loud”

“some questions you have to be focused to answer it”

“I was on the phone, so I got the wrong answer”

“had played this game for 7 hours.”

Highlighted Enjoyment

Heightened enjoyment is the pleasurable elements of interaction (Agarwal & Karahanna, 2000).

“I was delighted with this event.”

“The game is fun”

“I was happy to pass the first question and read the comments,”

“I only got to question 6. I think the quiz is quite fun, and educational too.”

“I’m so proud of myself.”

“Happy! Tear is coming !!”

“I feel that the backbone is in a wrong shape now”

“I laughed a lot when you said that your shake till almost hitting the dog.”

“Gain huge muscle! My phone almost broken”

“Hooray! Hooooooooray!”

“I passed it!!!!”

“😍😍😍”

“🤣🤣🤣🤣”

“OMG!!!!! I have seen someone sharing that he got 10 coins, I was thinking: Is he crazy? Is it real?

But my mom just shook and got it. AMAZING! (While my total coins are still only 1) I told you, we

have to be in this group! @Dusitra”

4.6 Meaningful Engagement

The data analysis reveals several codes relating to meaningful engagement outcomes

such as continue to play, stickiness and purchase intention. Subsequent data analysis is

implemented. Eventually, valid principles are listed with supporting quotes as below table.

The frequencies are 164 items of stickiness and 34 items of purchase intention.

Table 6 Meaningful engagement

Stickiness

Stickiness refers to the capacity of the gamified social commerce “to attract and retain customers”

(Chin-Lung Hsu & Lin, 2016; Lin, Luo, Cheng, & Li, 2019)

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“I did nothing all day because I want to wait to play games and collect the coins”

“Gonna shake up my phone the whole day”

“Even complain but I still keep playing it.”

“I love playing and keeping up to date with SHOPEE SHAKE SHAKE activity.”

“Normally I check-in every day. I sleep late because when it’s midnight I will check in

immediately.”

“At this point, I even asked my English teacher to take a break for 10 minutes and play it!

#ShopeeShakeShake 10 minutes played, then the point is I do not play alone. Play all the rooms.

hahaha”

“It's a family activity! One hand holds a bottle, another one hand hold game. Family FUN 2019”

“On the company meeting but play all the apps #QuizHunter #ShopeeQuiz #ShopeeShakeShake

#AnnaQuizShow #LiveLive.”

“I play every day, even I have to hide it from my boss”

Purchase Intention

“I just use coins just to deduct my delivery fee”

“I revisited the app to purchase some products”

“Even get more or less, people still want to buy.”

“Today, I brought kitchen stuff for thousands of baht.”

“The purchase cannot be done.”

“At least I will share to get coins to use for delivery shipping fee then”

“I usually believe in this application and often make purchases.”

“I already listed the product I wanted to buy, once I got the code, I instantly used it,”

“So, I recently completed the purchase with a discount code, but I just knew that 99 free delivery

until tomorrow.”

“I usually do online shopping on the app. It was ok and the price was low. I like it.”

4.7 Service failure

The data analysis reveals the possible impact of system failure on meaningful

engagement. Subsequent data analysis is implemented. Eventually, valid principles are

listed with supporting quotes as below table. The frequency is 83 items for system failure.

Table 7 System failure

System Failure

“service content (i.e., information and functionalities) offered by an e-commerce website is not delivered in

a conducive manner that facilitates consumers in accomplishing their transactional activities and/or

objectives.” (Tan, Benbasat, & Cenfetelli, 2016)

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“I did nothing, but when I sign in, it's already like this. What's the hack!”

“What's wrong with this Shopee? I haven’t shake it yet, but the screen already shows that I got 0 coins”

“Got the special prize then they asked to recall”

“App sent me a message informing that the system is broken. There will be a cancellation of the previous

reward I have received.”

“I could not purchase anything too.”

“My coins have disappeared, where can I get it back?”

“Wonder how much damage was done to the we”

“Coin distribution system of Shopee has been suck for a long time.”

“Shake it notification always bounced off”

“in the morning, the server was unstable and gave me a cupcake, but I did not get anything for the previous

game.”

“Playing quiz on Shopee. I answered right but it showed that I was wrong, and I became the audience.”

“It is now 20:00 and it’s happening again. This was like in the afternoon. Why did they launch this game?”

“people complained that there was a lost connection.

When I arrived in the second round. It happened”

“It happened again.”

“Hey! How come it like this, confused!!!”

4.8 Model of gamified social ecommerce

Based on the foundation framework of Liu et al. (2017) and the results of netnography,

a model of gamified social commerce is proposed as Figure 2. The model shows that game

elements (i.e., reward, challenge and collaboration) and social elements (i.e., social

presence, information support and emotional support) have a mix impact on the

interactivity, then, influence meaningful engagement of customers. The design of game

elements in social commerce can be effective with the support from social elements. For

example, the design of a higher reward and a higher challenge might lead to the higher

collaboration. The information support is also promote the collaboration, and influence the

interactivity among users. In terms of meaningful engagement, users with the absorption

experience when playing game inside the social commerce platform might continue to play

and stick with the platform. The purchase can be a consequence of the process, when the

design of game commonly encourage users to buy products using the rewards from game.

Purchase behavior is also the final target of the social platforms.

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Figure 4. Model of a gamified social ecommerce

5. DISCUSSIONS

5.1 Discussions on results

Conducting the qualitative method as netnography approach, the study reflects what

users think, feel, and act at the time they posted online. The research investigates

gamification elements and social elements, which influence customer meaningful

engagement. The results include 10 main constructs in several themes including reward,

challenge, collaboration (game elements), social presence, social support (social elements),

interactivity, cognitive absorption, stickiness, purchase intention (meaningful engagement),

and system failure (constraints). The findings offer a deep understanding on the

combination between gamification and social commerce. Additionally, the findings are

combined with study of Liu et al. (2017) to propose a research model for gamified social

commerce.

5.2 Theoretical implications

This research makes several important contributions. First, this research addressed the

questions of Liu et al. (2017): “how should gamification design elements be used to

encourage cooperation between team members and competition between teams?” and “how

should social support design elements be applied to encourage cooperation between users?”.

The results show that gamification design elements (i.e., reward and challenge) can enhance

collaboration. It is also proved that social support could enhance collaboration. Second, this

study investigates the mix impact of game elements and social elements on interactivity in

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the context of gamified social commerce. Third, this study also suggests a new construct

(i.e., system failure) which can influence the experience and behavior of users. Those new

constructs help to extend the foundation model of Liu et al. (2017) in the context of

gamified social commerce.

5.3 Practical Implication.

Even gamification is still in the early stages of developing a fully integrated marketing

in social commerce. Understanding these journeys is crucial because they become the

unique principle and effective tool for social commerce business to acquire new customers

with low cost and positive engagement. Gamification could be an antecedent of interaction

and engagement in the practice of business.

5.4 Limitations and Future Research

First, gamification in social commerce is new. During our research time, the game

elements are not stable and may be rapidly developed by platforms. Second, the data is

collected mainly from Thai users. Although Thailand is the biggest country among

Southeast Asian countries in terms of social commerce users, the sample might be less

representative. Last, there is a limitation for checking validity and reliability for qualitative

data of Twitter. We hope that the further research could use more consistent gamification

elements, narrow the duration of data collection and explore more constructs and

relationships to develop the model of gamification in social commerce.

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