The influence of informative and normative features of social e-commerce UGC on consumers’ purchase intention: the moderating effect of persuasive resistance

Li Wang, Yong Liu, Xiaochun Liu and Mengyuan Liu

Behaviour and Information Technology, 2025, vol. 44, issue 16, 4065-4081

Abstract: UGC refers to information posted online by users that can influence other consumers’ purchasing decisions. With the growth of the Internet, marketers’ reliance on UGC has increased. This study aims to explain how the informational and normative features of UGC affect consumers’ purchase intentions, and also investigates the mediating role of perceived value in the relationship between informational features and purchase intentions and the moderating role of persuasion resistance. In this paper, questionnaire data from 352 social e-commerce users was collected for the empirical study, and for data analysis and testing hypotheses, SPSS and Smart PLS were employed. In addition, the data of 4,724 reviews of 286 notes on Little Red Book's La Mer magic face cream were analyzed by Python to quantify the variables with real review data, and hypotheses 1 and 2 were repeatedly tested. The results show that in the central path, informative features (diversity and relevance) indirectly affect purchase intention through perceived value. This indicates that providing rich and relevant User Generated Content (UGC) is an important strategy to enhance consumer purchase intent. Persuasive resistance plays a negative role in regulating perceived value and purchase intention, it underscores the importance of maintaining the authenticity and neutrality of information to reduce the negative impact of persuasion resistance on purchase intentions. In the marginal path, normative features (the publisher's professionalism) positively affect purchasing intention. Therefore, emphasis should be placed on enhancing the professionalism of content creators to increase consumer trust, thereby promoting purchase behaviour. Finally, according to the research results, this paper proposes countermeasures on how to promote consumers’ purchase intention from both enterprises and platforms.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/0144929X.2025.2461228

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