Virtual Community Confidence In The Impact On Consumer Networks Buy Wishes

The existence of the Internet bought unprecedented impact to human lifestyle and consumption habits, in turn causing major changes to global economy. The newly developed Internet applications presented more opportunities for entrepreneurs. Among them, the new business model known as online group-buying has been particularly prevalent in China in recent years. It involves an Internet platform providing a place where consumers can group together to purchase products, to increase the consumers' bargaining power by the sheer volume of orders. Past research in this area generally targets discounts, group-buying methods, pricing schemes, and profit models. Less focus has been placed on the study of how mutual trust among members within the virtual community and benign community relationships affect consumer' s willingness to participate in online group-buying.Evidently, with the passage of time and the development of Internet communities, members of virtual communities also share information like their behavior in real world communities. Word-of-mouth information spread through interactions between virtual community members, in turn causing the members to develop trust and loyalty to the community. Many enterprises intend to tap into the profiteering potential of this model, and have created online platforms to operate virtual communities to serve as communication channels between the enterprise and the clientele as well as utilize it as a marketing ploy. Whether the mutual trust and interactions among members within the virtual community causes change to the consumption behavior of individual members of the virtual community remains a topic to be studied to complement research with other aspects of online group-buying studies.This paper focuses on the aspect of virtual community trust, combining the theory of Internet word-of-mouth and Technology Acceptance Model, to develop a deeper understanding of how virtual communities influence consumer participation in online group-buying, and to extract the key factors that impact consumer willingness to participate in online group-buying. The research involves survey responses from 314 individual consumers with online group-buying experience from Shanghai, Beijing, and Jiangsu Province. The responses are processed and analyzed with SPSS 15.0 and AMOS 7.0. The final results are used to provide suggestions to operators of online group-buying platforms, and to provide a different direction to academia for related studies, providing theoretical guidance and empirical evidence for the online group-buying marketing practices.The primary contributions of this study are:1,Innovation in Research Aspect: The majority of studies in China focus on the organization and refinement of the reasons that create group-buying and its development models. This study spans across the fields of Psychology, Internet Marketing, and Information Management. Extracting factors that influence virtual community trust from the consumer's point of view, to discuss how virtual community trust and interaction among members influence the willingness of consumer's to participate in online group-buying.2,Innovation in Research Content: This study is based on Chinese consumer samples, with the combination of community trust theory, word-of-mouth theory, and TAM, together with analysis of past research efforts, and the addition of factors including community relationship, interactivity, and personal preference, to create and validate models of the factors that influence consumer willingness to participate in online group-buying.3,Innovation in Research Validation: SEM is utilized to validate the research model with new analysis methodology. Together with the development of a localized "Internet Group-Buying Willingness Scale", for a thorough induction of factors that influence consumer willingness, to assist online group-buying platform operators to understand the value of virtual community management, allowing the enterprise to attract and maintain loyal customers with new channels and management foundations, and to provide theoretical guidance together with empirical evidence for the marketing practices of online group-buying.