An Empirical Study About The Impact Of Rank Of E-shopping Search Engine On Consumer Purchase Behaviors

Nowdays, online shopping market maintains sustained growth. Online information search is a ubiquitous and critically important activity in e-commerce. Shopping search engine plays a prominent role in the online world. More than half of visitors arrive web sites from a shopping search engine rather than through a direct link from other web pages. In the context of traditional search engine results page (SERP), the rank of links has a significant impact on click-through rate, conversion rate and brand awareness. That is partly because of the consumers’top-down browing habits. However, it is hard to say that the rank of links has the same effect on click-through rate, conversion rate and brand awareness in the context of online shopping search results page. In addition, shopping websites highlight specific more and more indicators, such as price, sales volume, reputation star rating, reviews, and so on, in order to assist consumers in forming reliable shopping decisions. Compared with the traditional SERP, whether the rank of links still affects attention, CTR, purchase intention and brand awareness significantly with the combined effects of these shopping indicators? Since current academic research has not explained such phenomenon, it is a topic worth studying.Based on some interviews with the theory of informatin search behaviors and online shopping behavior, this study puts forward a sound theoretical framework. That is to say, the rank of links plays as the main independent variable, and price and sales volume which are relative vital roles in e-commerce study play as other two independent variables. Meanwhile, click through behavior, consumer purchase intention and brand awareness play as dependent variables.The study adopts the experiment methodology to simulate real decision-making situations when consumers face with online shopping search engine results page, so as to explore the impact of rank on consumers’purchase behavior and brand awareness. According to the empirical analysis of283valid questionnaires, we found that the rank is still able to significantly affect the click behavior of consumers with the combined effect of price and sale volume. That is to say, the higher the rank of links is, the higher the CTR is. However, the rank does not have the same significant impact on the consumers’willingness to buy and brand awareness. After all, consumers are rational, utility-maximizing decision-makers. The rank which gives consumers with preconceived impression may be replaced by the information of price and sales volume closely related to eventual shopping decisions. Although the top-ranking merchant links enjoy the natural advantages of location, and attract consumers’attention easily, and then trigger click action, it is not inevitable to lead to actual buying behavior. Moreover, thoese links ranking at the bottom of results list can still have the opportunity to take good advantage of perfect combination of price and sales volume, to stimulate consumers’willingness to buy and increase the degree of brand awareness. In addition, we also found the presence of herd behavior on the online shopping market, and the majority of online shoppers with a strong price sensitivity. The conclusion of this paper has a double reference for merchants and consumers.