Research On Effect Of Nutrition-fact Information On Online Food Sales

With the rapid development of China’s economy,consumer’s attitude towards to consumption is not limited to eating,but to pay more attention to nutrition and health.In view of the popularity and application of the internet,online purchase of food has become an important way of shopping for consumers.However,China’s food safety problems are endless.Some enterprises provide false nutrition-fact information to consumers,deceiving and misleading consumers.To regulate the food market,the state has introduced policies that required food manufactures to provide nutrition-fact labels on pre-packaged food,not including online sellers.As a way of shopping different from offline shopping,the online shopping has serious information asymmetry.Consumers can’t observe the nutrition-fact information when online sellers don’t provide the information to consumers.Nutrition-fact information has been shown to influence consumer purchase decision in offline store,while the effect of nutrition-fact information on food sales has not been explored.Therefore,it is necessary to study the role of nutrition-fact information in online shopping.Our study is to explore the effects of nutrition-fact information on online food sales based on the cue utilization theory,cue consistency theory and information cascade theory.Our study chose two cues: word of mouth and history sales to show the special environment,exploring the interaction between nutrition-fact information and other online cues.In addition,we considered the different effects of nutrition-fact information on healthy and unhealthy food sales.We conducted field experiment to prove the hypotheses,indicating that online sellers hold different attitudes to nutrition-fact information.Specifically,only some sellers choose to provide nutrition-fact labels to consumers.And the nutrition-fact information has a positive impact on food sales,implying that nutrition-fact information can enhance online food sales.Compared with unhealthy food,the nutrition-fact information is more effective for healthy food.The interaction between nutrition-fact information and other online cues is positive and significant,indicating that nutrition labeling will strengthen the positive impact of other cues on food sales.In addition,we conducted an experiment using eye-tracking system to explore the necessity and helpfulness of nutrition-fact information.The results show that consumer would pay considerable time to read it and the fixation duration on nutrition-fact information could affect the purchasing decisions.Nutrition-fact information can protect consumers and offers a profitable path for marketers.Our conclusions provide a reasonable proposal for online sellers to improve the display of information and provide reference for state to public policies.