E-commerce Recommended Agent Purchase Decisions

With the development of e-commerce, more and more consumers go shopping online. It provides consumers with more choices, however, problems was brought as well, such as information overload, low-quality of information and so on.In order to mitigate information overload pressure and enhance consumer satisfaction with online shopping, A large number of e-business websites launched Recommendation Agent to provide various recommendation services, such as related product recommendation, products evaluation stars, consumer's evaluation, Top-N recommendation and so on, impacting on consumer purchasing decisions. Although recommendation agents have been put to use widespread, theoretical research about the relationship between RA and purchasing decision-making is far from sufficient.This paper, based on previous researches on consumer's use intention of RA and the effects of RA use, provided an integration of TAM and the theory of consumer purchase decision-making. Then, this paper launched cognitive value and trust, mainly discussed the mechanism of the RA influence on consumer's decision-making from the perspective of the Characteristics of RA, RA platform and the interaction between user and RA.This research adopted both nominal analysis and empirical analysis to conduct research. This paper put forward the hypotheses and carried out investigaitons on more than 300 online consumers in several Universities. In the data analysis, the author adopts the softwares of AMOS7.0 and SPSS 16.0 to do factor analysis, reliability analysis, ANOVA and SEM. On the basis of data analysis, the paper tested the hypotheses and drew out some meaningful conclutions. Concerning the conclusions which are drawn by this research, the paper offered reasonable explanations. The main conclusions are showed as follows:1. Consumer's cognitive value of RA and consumer's trust of RA have an positive effect on RA's influencing on consumer's purchasing decision-making.2. The website's image, recommendations' customization and presentation have an positive effect on consumer's cognitive value of RA. However, consumer's cognitive value of RA is mostly affected by recommendations' customization.3. Consumer's cognitive value of RA, website's image and users' familiarity of RA have an positive effect on consumer's trust of RA. However, consumer's trust of RA is mostly affected by consumer's cognitive value of RA.The effects of website's image on consumer's trust of RA is partially mediated by consumer's cognitive value of RA. The effects of recommendations' customization on consumer's trust of RA is fully mediated by consumer's cognitive value of RA.4. RA will indeed affect consumer purchasing decisions, however, the effects is not strong enough. The direct reason is that consumer's awareness of the value and confidence of RA is not strong. The indirect reason is that the RA's personalized recommendation function is not perfect enough, consumer's familiarity of RA is not enough and RA's recommended information presentation is not good enough .Based upon these conclusions, this paper also puts forward some insights and suggestions which are valuable to personalized Recommendation Service e-commerce building, trying to provide a sound theoretical and practical foundation for further purchase decision-making research.