The Determinants Of Online Purchase Intention: An Empirical Study

As a new marketing channel, the online shopping supplies consumers with rich information about commodities and characteristic services, which can allow them to shop at anytime they like. Comparing with the traditional marketing channels, it owns some natural advantages. However, the percentage of online shopping over China and world is still rather low. Perceived risk and the lack of trust are the two major factors that hold online shopping back, but only few researchers have been done on the subject of the complicated relationship between them and no empirical study has been done to verify it. Obviously the perceived risk and trust scale fitting in with the online shopping comes out without the support from theory. Therefore it still needs to be developed; In addition, online consumers have double characters: one is ordinary consumer character, and the other one is information system user character, for online shopping needs consumers to complete it through computer and its communication with Internet. However, the former research has always left out this kind of relationship.Based on the puzzle of reality and short of research, we have established a model about the factors influencing online purchase intention, which can help us to study the factors influencing online purchase intention and their mutual relationship. The model was mainly based on the Theory of Reasoned Action, Technology Acceptance Model, Trust Theory and Perceived Risk Theory. And it takes Perceived Ease of Use, Perceived Usefulness, Trust and Perceived Risk as the influencing factors, including some influencing factors and causality that has been bore out in former researches, such as trust variable, mediating effect of perceived risk, etc. We have also designed the perceived risk and trust scale fitting in with the online shopping, based on the literatures.With the 230 valid data from on and off line random samples, this paper has done empirical study to the hypothetical model and scale. Firstly, we have used confirmatory factor analysis technology to test the reliability and validity of all research instruments, and the result has showed that the perceived risk and trust scale has a high degree of internal consistency, convergent validity and differentiate validity, which means that the structure of the scale is valid. Secondly, we have used the Structural Equation Modeling to validate the Theoretical Research Model, and every fitting index has showed that the Theoretical Model has good validity. The result hasindicated that all antecedent variables had remarkable effect on purchase attitude and the consumer attitude is a major positive determinant of consumer buying intention, with which 56% of the behavior intention deviation can be explained. At the same time, the mediating effect of perceived risk is supported by the empirical study, which further interprets the complicate causality chain among the variables.