Study Of Consumer's Perceived Risk And Online Shopping Behavior

Based on the statistics in June 2008, the number of Chinese Internet user is increased to 253 millions and occupies first place in the world. The huge Internet user body creates an important base for the development of Internet commerce. Consumers' Internet shopping is a new research area of consumer behavior; it is theoretically valuable as well as practically important.In the studies of consumer decision behavior, perceived risk has been always interested by researchers. Especially in the context of Internet shopping, research of consumer's perceived risk is significantly valuable and meaningful. However, current researches are lack of deep understanding consumers' perceived risk and its measurement in Internet shopping. In addition, consumers now have more shopping channels to choose, because of emergence of Internet commerce, but current consumer decision theories empharsize more on brand or product choices and it is lack of deep studies about consumer's shopping channel choices. This dissertation conducted the studies from the perspective of consumer's perceived risk and channel choices.The studies of this dissertation include the following parts: firstly, to define the concepts of consumer's perceived risk and channel choice in the Internet context, and identify the research problems; secondly, to develop theoretical framework of the perceived risk based shopping channel choices of consumer's Internet shopping, renationalizing concepts, and constructing hypothesis based on the comprehensive literature review; thirdly, to develop the scale of consumer's perceived risk in Internet shopping and research its reliability and validity; finally, to test the hypothesis in the theoretical framework of the perceived risk based consumer's behavior in Internet shopping empirically through surveys and experiments.The empirical methodology is applied in the research of this dissertation. Based on the empirical observation and theoretical analysis, the concepts are defined, hypothesis of the relationship between concepts reflected to actual phenomenon are developed, and a parsimonious and powerful theoretical framework covered concepts and hypothesis is constructed in the research. Then, observations, surveys, and experiments, methods usually for behavior science are applied to collect data, and advanced statistical programs are used for data analysis. Based on the consequences of data analysis, the hypothesis in the theoritical framework are tested to judge the corrections of the theory and to raise new issues for future research.After having conducted theoritical research and empirical analysis, three valuable conclusions are obtained: Firstly, the dissertation defined the constructs of consumer's perceived risk, trust, hesitation, online-shopping attitude and intention, as well as personal factors, contextual factors, and marketing stimuli, and developed a series of hypotheses. Secondly, the dissertation operationalized the concept of perceived risk and developed a scale of consumer's perceived risk in Internet shopping with five dimensions of store source risk, delivery risk, monetary risk, product risk, and privacy risk and 15 items, and tested the reliability and validity of the scale. Thirdly, the dissertation tested theoretical hypothesis of perceived risk related consumer behavior in Internet shopping, and analyzed the impacts of personal, contextual factors as well as marketing stimuli on perceived risk.The academic contributions of the dissertation include constructing theoretical framework of perceived risk related consumer behavior in Internet shopping, developing scale of consumer's perceived risk in Internet shopping and testing its reliability and validity, testing the hypothesis in the theoretical framework through building structure modeling equation, manipulating perceived risk through marketing stimuli and analyzing the effects of marketing stimuli on negative Internet shopping behavior, in addition, analyzing the effects of perceived risk as mediator between marketing stimuli and negative Internet shopping behavior.The theoritical significance of the research includes expanding the perceived risk into the area of Internet shopping, developing new reliable and validated perceived risk scale, empherszing the ignored shopping channel choices and negative buying behaviors. The consequances provided new knowledge to describe Internet shopping cognitive behaviors and raised new issues for future researches. The practical significance of the research is to provide describtive, explainatory, and forecasting information related consumer's Internet shopping behavior for better understanding consumers and marketing and public polices.