Individual Differences In Consumer Acceptance Of Online Shopping - Hangzhou Sample-based Empirical Study

Online shopping has increased rapidly as a new direct interactive shopping channel that has some major advantages made it highly attractive for commercial use: cheap and instantaneous communication with global customers; customization of communication and marketing to individuals; and instantaneous distribution of information products. Under the context of Internet, a series of changes are taking place with regard to people's consuming conceptions, consuming modes as well as consumer status. As a result, a new type of online consumer behavior, completely different from the traditional consumer behavior has come into being. This kind of internet-based consuming behavior has attracted wide attention from the theoretical circle and prompted a lot of researches at home and abroad.The research into consumer behavior focuses on the main factors affecting the purchase decision-making process and its influences on consumer behavior. Purchase decision-making process refers to the consumer psychological and behavior intention before using and disposal of products and services. It belongs to the forming the attitude. The variables affecting the consumer's decision-making process are motivation, life style, beliefs, attitudes, intentions, values and others, of which, beliefs and attitudes affects consumer's information collection; intention influences the decision-making. In this dissertation, we mainly discussed the validity and influence of the relations between attitude, intention and behavior from the perspective of consumers. We developed the consumer acceptance online-shopping model based on the framework of attitude-intention-behavior, and focused on the validity of model and interrelations and influences between the variables. We have introduced a new variable, the customer characteristics, a external variable, into the model and analyze individual differences impacting on perceived, attitude, intention, and behavior of online-shopping, in order to find the critical factors on customer's online-shopping intention and behavior. The research on the interrelations of attitudes, intentions and behavior and their influences runs through this article.The first section of this dissertation is literature review on the trends of the research on consumer behavior and related theories. We hold, based on reading a large number of documents, analysis and induction, that from a technology point of view, consumers' acceptance of online shopping modes is similar to their acceptance ofinformation technology; from the innovation point of view, consumers' acceptance of online shopping modes is a process of accepting something new technology. Thus, the research findings of the attitude, intention model - Technology Acceptance Model and Innovation Diffusion Theory can serve as the most direct theoretical and methodological base for the research in this article. On the above basis, this dissertation concentrates on the following three parts:(1) Construct the consumer acceptance of online-shopping model, and then prove the validity of the model through empirical research.According to consumer behavior model theory, beliefs and attitudes mainly influence the information collection of consumers and intentions affect consumers' decision-making process. So this dissertation is based on the theory of attitudes, intentions and behavior models. Online shopping requires that consumers have access to a computer that connects to the Internet and that they have considerable knowledge about how to use computers and the Internet, so consumers' acceptance of online stores is a process of accepting information technology. Based on Rational Action Theory, the extended attitude-intention relation is aimed at explaining and predicting the users' technology acceptance model of information system and providing a theoretical base for our research on key factors affecting online shopping. On the other hand, online retailing is a brand-new mode, and consumers' adopting online shopping is a process of adopting innovation. So Innovation Diffu...