The Influence Of Flow Experience On Consumers' Preference To Shopping Website

Flow experience is an important experience. The researches on it have gained a lot of achievements in the areas of sports, Internet addiction, education and so on. With the continuing research, scholars have began to apply the flow experience to the field of online shopping behavior. However, the study in this aspect in China is relatively weak. So at this point, the research in this paper on the online consumer purchasing behavior based on flow theory has a considerable theoretical and practical significance.On the basis of former research fruits of scholars at home and abroad, this paper makes the PAT(Person, Artefact, Task) model as basis, introduces Flow theory and Trust theory, constructs the model of how flow experience and trust affected the consumer's preference to shopping website, by using flow experience and trust as dependent variables and internet interaction and involvement as pre-variables, and then empirically tests the relationships among these variables and the model.During the operation of this study, interview method is used for many times to amend the questionnaire in order to ensure the validity of variables measuring. Besides, dates of the study are obtained by random sampling in two ways—network research and field research. The model and relation assumption are tested and analyzed by SPSS 15.0 software package through Cronbach's alpha reliability analysis, factor analysis, Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis. The outcome shows:(1) Internet interaction and involvement have the remarkable forward influence to the flow experience; (2) Internet interaction and involvement have the remarkable forward influence to the trust; (3) Flow experience and trust have the remarkable forward influence to the preference; (4) The more online shopping experience a consumer has, the stronger flow experience he can perceive; (4) a consumer could perceive stronger flow experience when he has goal-directed behavior than when he has experiential behavior. Anyway, all these outcome confirms the assumed model and relations in this paper.According to the above study, a number of marketing proposals are made for website administrative staff to enhance consumers'preference to the shopping website and increase their patronizing. Although there are some innovations in this paper, there are still some defects as flow experience and its influencing factors are very complex and the samples and statistic analysis technology are insufficient. So a further study is necessary to improve the generalization of the research.