AEMPS

Comparing Likes and Favorites as Signals of Purchase-Oriented Behavior in Social E-Commerce Beauty Content

Author

Xinran Liu * 1

1 Guangzhou Maritime University

Corresponding Author

Xinran Liu

Keywords

Social Commerce, Engagement Quality, Favorites, Behavioral Signal

Abstract

With the development of Social Commerce, consumers increasingly rely on User-Generated Content, platform interaction data and engagement metrics for product evaluation and purchase-related decision-making. In the beauty-related Social E-Commerce context, likes, comments, shares and favorites/collects not only represent content popularity, but also may reflect different levels of consumer interest. This article mainly studies whether favorites/collects are closer to purchase-oriented behavioral signals than likes. This article uses Alibaba Cloud Tianchi Social E-Commerce User Purchase Behavior Dataset as the main public dataset and focuses on beauty and personal care category. Research methods include descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, verification of derived behavioral indicators, stepwise Ordinary Least Squares regression, standardized coefficient comparison, Wald test and robustness checks. The results show that favorites/collects present a more stable positive association with derived purchase-oriented behavioral index, while likes weaken or turn into a negative coefficient after controlling favorites/collects. However, the binary purchase label check did not show significant results. Therefore, the conclusion of this article should be interpreted as exploratory association evidence, not causal evidence of actual purchase conversion.

Citation

Xinran Liu. Comparing Likes and Favorites as Signals of Purchase-Oriented Behavior in Social E-Commerce Beauty Content. AEMPS (2026) Vol. 287: 17-24. DOI: 10.54254/2754-1169/2026.LD35313.

References

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