Consumer Conformity In Internet Group Purchasing

Along with the perfection of infrastructure construction and the futher popularity of the internet, the electronic commerce market in our country has been expanding in leaps and bounds. Internet Group Purchasing (IGP), as one of the rising stars of online service in recent years, is growing quite rapidly. By the end of2011, there are5,877group purchasing websites in our country, with64.65million users and an annual sales of over20billion yuan. Despite the booming market for IGP, the group purchasing websites are having a really hard time. Many vendors are facing a serious crisis of confidence. And it is not uncommon that consumers suffer from their impulsiveness taking part in IGP. There are some very obvious differences among IGP and other ordinary e-commerce modes. Consumers are able to get even less information about the vendors and their products; while on the other hand, the number of the consumers who have bought the product is put up on the website in a conspicuous way to catch people’s attention efficiently and effectively, which therefore can greatly influence their purchasing decision. Consequently, this paper tried to proof the existence of consumer conformity in IGP and find its influence factors to help vendors, group purchasing websites and consumers.This paper mainly focuses on consumer conformity in Internet Group Purchasing. Our research hypotheses and theoretical model are based on the literature review of Chinese and Western researches about IGP and conformity. We used all the transaction data of the physical commodities on tuan.qq.com from January23rd,2012to March26th,2012as our sample data, which in all has3,681commodities and152,041panel data. During the process of empirical research, we built a fixed-effects model and a random-effects model, and used STATA11to do regression analysis separately. The final results support all our theoretical hypotheses, and our conclusions are listed as follows:1. The number of consumers who have bought IGP products has a positive effect on consumer participation behavior.2. The length of the time from the beginning of IGP moderates consumer conformity; the closer to the beginning of the transaction, the number of consumers who have bought IGP products has a greater positive effect on consumer participation behavior.3. The length of the time left moderates consumer conformity; the closer to the end of the transaction, the number of consumers who have bought IGP products has a greater positive effect on consumer participation behavior.4. The type of IGP products moderates consumer conformity; the number of consumers who have bought IGP products has a greater positive effect on consumer participation behavior for experience goods than for search goods.5. Price and discounts of IGP products, the order of display on group purchasing websites, whether vendors provide24hour online customer service, and whether it is time for customers to sleep all have significant effect on consumer participation behavior in IGP; while putting up cross advertisment on the pages of other products helps little with the sales volume.