The impact of social commerce feature richness on website stickiness through cognitive and affective factors: An experimental study

•Social commerce feature richness is introduced as novel theoretical concept.•Providing functionally diverse features raises the social commerce feature richness.•The richness of social commerce features positively affects the website stickiness.•Rich social commerce feature sets make websites more useful, enjoyable, and trustable. Website stickiness, which describes how much attention a website receives from its users, is a critical success factor for e-commerce websites. While many e-commerce websites are currently integrating social commerce features to enhance consumers’ shopping experience, little is known about how such features affect the website stickiness, especially when used in combination. Building upon the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) paradigm, we develop a research model to explain how social commerce feature richness affects the website stickiness through consumers’ perception of cognitive and affective factors. The research model is evaluated in a controlled online experiment, in which 164 participants used variants of an e-commerce website with varying levels of social commerce feature richness. The results indicate that the feature richness positively affects cognitive and affective factors, which in turn increase the website stickiness. This implies that e-commerce websites can be made more successful when using functionally diverse social commerce features in combination.