Resaerch On Influences Of Product Uncertainty On Consumers' Return Behavior In Online Market

With the rapid development of Internet technology and e-commerce,consumers can buy all kinds of products at any time and any place through the network,which provides a great convenience to consumers.But with the information transfer limitation of Internet,consumers cannot actually see and touch the product like in traditional offline store,which causes product uncertainty.The content of product uncertainty including product quality uncertainty and product fit uncertainty.The former refers to the product's objective quality uncertainty,the latter refers to the degree how product's personalized attribute matching with consumers' preferences.Consumers' online shopping process can be divided into pre-purchase and postpurchase.Consumers' post-purchase behavior is a comparative result of pre-evaluation and post-evaluation.Product uncertainty can affect consumers' pre-evaluation of product and then affect consumers' post-purchase behavior.At present,consumers' return behavior is the research hotspot in the consumer post-purchase behavior research.Data used in this study is from our primary questionnaire survey of consumers in China's largest C2 C shopping website – Taobao.Some important conclusions are drawn by the partial least squares structural equation model(PLS-SEM)and the software of SmartPLS 2 M3.Firstly,both product quality uncertainty and fit uncertainty have significantly positive effect on product returns and the effect of product fit uncertainty is stronger.Secondly,the results confirm that online product description,product review and social presence can reduce product quality / fit uncertainty.In addition,the study also demonstrated that the return policy and consumers' self-mending intention have respectively positive and negative effects on product returns.Finally,suggestions are put forward on how online sellers can reduce consumer perceived product uncertainty and reduce consumer returns.