Research On The Medium Effect On Online Consumer Choice Making

Medium is exchange product consumers use for receiving the itemsthey want. Medium is widely used in traditional and online purchasing, thusresearchers haven’t paid particular attention to the impact of this commonexchange product on consumer choice making until recent years. Foreignresearchers started analyzing the effect of medium on consumer choicemaking in traditional purchasing recently, and provide many meaningfulsuggestions for businessmen based on the effect of medium maximization.However, the research on medium effect is relatively limited, andprevious research mainly focus on impact of medium on consumer choicemaking in traditional purchasing. Therefore, with the rapid growth ofpopulation of online consumers in China, it’s of great importance to analyzeimpact of medium on consumer choice making in online purchasing for bothperspectives of theory and application.Based on above subject, this research designs two studies to analyze theeffect of medium on consumer choice making in online purchasing, and thewhole experiment process simulates the real online purchasing environment.One experiment is about mobile phone online charging, the mediummaximization effect is compared between control group and test group; theother is online investigation considering an extra factor--online mediumproportion, based on experiment one, sample is divided into control group,high proportion medium group, and low proportion medium group. By conducting these two experiments, it’s discovered that onlinemedium maximization effect is similar with that in traditional purchasingenvironment, and the existence of online medium change consumer’sevaluation of cost and return, thus affects consumer online choice; Besides,the proportion of online medium also affects consumer online choice making,and the medium maximization effect of online medium disappears if theproportion of medium approaches or be less than return proportion.The evaluation point of this research is giving insights to whethermedium in online purchasing environment (for example, online points) havesimilar effect as medium in traditional purchasing environment (for example,coupon, token etc.) and how proportion of online medium affects consumeronline choice making.