On The Trust Issue Of Chinese Online Consumer Behavior

Online shopping is growing rapidly in Chinese market and the most importantelement of the online shopping is trust. Thus, the importance of investigating the trustissue is not hidden to anyone both in the E-commerce and the academic area anymore.Due to the cultural differences of Chinese online consumer behavior and the limitednumber of researches on Chinese E-vendors, more behavioral studies are needed todeeply investigate the Chinese online consumer behavior.The objective of this study is to investigate the effect of trust on Chinese onlineconsumers purchase intentions, on decision making choice and behaviour. Based onthe literature review, we first built a framework and formulated hypotheses. Theessential factors related to Chinese online consumer behaviour were identifiedthrough a survey among300Chinese students who already had an experience ofonline shopping once before. An experiment including two online shopping gameswas designed based on the important factors influencing the Chinese online shoppingbehaviour. After all, a computer-mediated experiment was conducted with56Chinesestudents as decision makers. The experiment was based on trust game procedure.Basic descriptive statistics and analysis of variance tests were used for testing thehypotheses.The results confirmed the role of trust in online purchase intentions. Moreover,further analysis based on the data driven from the online shopping trust game haveproved that not always the rating systems does improve the level of trust amongonline consumers. One more interesting outcome was that according to the sensitivityanalysis quality level defined by the sellers has more effect on consumers trust thanthe proposed price.