How Do Price And E-Seller Reputation Cues Influence Consumers’ Online Purchase Decision Under Different Level Of Product Involvement?

With the rapid development of e-commerce in China, more and more customers accept and pay attention to Online shopping. The growing transaction sacle serves to show its potential and strength. However, online shopping has its particular environment that consumers can’t get the real feelings of the goods, so consumers have use more extrinsic cues to assist their shopping decision. As two of the critical extrinsic cues, the cues price and E-seller reputation have received a certain amount of attention. Scholars have launched studies of their mechanism of action, but the researches about the interaction effect are far from being enough, especially the differences of the two cues’influence mechanism under different product involvement are need deeply explored.Traditional researches mainly based on the method of empirical and the behavior experiments. Because of the limitation of technology and method, the datas from traditional researches may not be very objective, and can’t detect the cognitive process behind behavior. Making up for the defects perfectly, this study can be divided into two stages, the stage one was establishing this research model based on S-O-R model, and then a questionnaire method was used to obtain respondents’ subjective report datas, which were analysed to test hypothesis. By means of the results, the influence of price and E-seller reputation on perceived value could be exposed, and the results showed how perceived value affect on purchase intention and the moderate effect of product invovlment. The second stage was to use the means of cognitive neuroscience-ERP experiment. Through simplifying and simulating the online shopping environment, ERP experiment was designed to explore neural mechanisms of online purchase with the cues price and E-seller reputation and study information processing and cognitive mechanism of consumers’brain activity. Combining with two stages of this study, conclusions can be summarized as follows:1. The cues rice and E-seller reputation will impact on perceived value, and the product involvement plays a role of moderator. When the product is high involvement only the cue E-seller reputation has a positive effect on perceived value, the cue price’ main effect and their interaction are not significant; while product is low involvement the cues E-seller reputation and price have a significant main effect on perceived value, and a significant interaction between them can be found.2. Cue consistency theory is partly proved. For low involvement product, when price and E-seller reputation are in the same direction, they will produce a synergistic interaction, which is in conformity with the cue utilization theory. For high involvement product, the consumers will have a more in-depth information processing, and the main reference of decisions is the more diagnostic cue(E-seller reputation), which is not easily manipulated. The more diagnostic cue will be allocated more attention and weight, so that it will influence perceived value and purchase decisions at the greatest extent, which conform to the warranting principle.3. When facing different combinations of price and E-seller reputation, consumers will make shopping decisions which is the process of brain information processing and corresponding cognitive processing. The process can be devided into different cognitive stages, including cognition of decision-making risk, cognition of decision-making conflict, cognition of decision-making evaluation. At different cognitive stages, stimulations induce different key electrical components, corresponding to N2, N400, LPP, etc.. And the main difference between different involvement is that the cues which induce electrical components are discrepant.