Research On The Influence Of Features Of E-Commerce Of Fresh Product On Customer’s Perceived Risk And Purchase Intention

As e-commerce evolves rapidly, online shopping is more and more popular. And the demand of buying fresh and high-quality agricultural products online is also increasing among busy residents who live in big cities. It results in the emergence of e-commerce of fresh agricultural product. Moreover, it is regarded as the last blue ocean not only in the e-commerce field but also in the retail industry. In recent years, e-commerce of fresh agricultural product has been developing rapidly, attracts increasing attention of the whole society, and becomes a hot research field.Current domestic research on e-commerce of fresh agricultural product still focuses on its overall condition, its developing model and its future development. There are some deep studies on cold chain establishment, but few are on product feature factor and customer behavior. Comparing to common e-commerce, e-commerce of fresh agricultural product is more risky for both merchants and customers. This is the reason why so much attention is paid. In the customer behavior study, perceived risk has always been regarded as an important internal factor variable in the empirical study. Moreover, combined with the real situation, in can be known that customers’ purchase intention in e-commerce of fresh agricultural product can be affected by perceived risk. Therefore, the thesis mainly studies the product feathers of e-commerce of fresh agricultural product and the relationship between perceived risk and purchase intention.Based on previous studies, and with empirical study, five feature factors factor of fresh agricultural product in e-commerce are extracted: safety, recommendation, novelty, affordability, and convenience. Based on the previous perceived risk dimension model, questions in this study were designed to measure customer’s perceived risk from five dimensions(financial risk, performance risk, physical risk, social risk, and time risk). Suggestions are offered to e-commerce merchants of fresh agricultural product based on the study on how the features of such product influence perceived risk and purchase intention and the relationship between customer’s perceived risk and purchase intention.In this study, customers in the first and second-tier cities in China are taken as samples, and 300 questionnaires are issued, measuring how features of fresh agricultural product in e-commerce influence customer’s perceived risk and purchase intention. The influence of customer’s perceived risk on purchase intention and the influence of feature factor on customer’s perceived risk and purchase intention are also analyzed.The study result shows that affordability, recommendation, convenience and safety influence negatively consumer’s perceived risk while novelty has a positive influence on it. Secondly, affordability, recommendation, convenience and safety influence positively on customer’s purchase intention while novelty has a negative influence on it. Thirdly, customer’s perceived risk has a negative influence on consumer’s purchase intention. Fourthly, the consumer’s perceived risk plays a partial mediating role between the feature factors of fresh product and the purchase intention.Finally, combining the conclusion and the real situation, suggestions are proposed for e-commerce merchants of fresh agricultural product with extremely-high cost, helping them utilize capital in the key points and reduce the sources of customer’s perceived risk and obtain larger benefit with the same amount of investment.