Research On Reference Group Influence On Initial Online Purchasing Decisions

The consumption choices of consumers are mostly influenced by social factors, within which reference group is one critical factor. When purchasing online for the first time and facing lots of uncertain factors, consumers will feel more risky than they purchase offline, and reference group will play a more important role in their consumption choices making. Based on the Reference Group Theory and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this research focuses on the process of customers'initial online purchase, analyzing the reference group influence on their purchasing decisions. The purpose of this research is to help online shop operators raise customers'perceived trust and reduce perceived risk, hence help customers accomplish their initial online purchase and improve customer loyalty.The main job of this paper can be concluded as follows:Firstly, through an overall review of relevant literatures, this paper builds an decision-making model of customers'initial online purchase based on reference group influence and TAM, and then proposes the suppositional relations between reference group influence and all the factors of TAM, and the suppositional relations between the influences by the two classes of reference group on customers'initial online purchasing decisions.Secondly, the paper pretests and revises the initial questionnaire with 75 samples survey in order to assure the validity and stability of the formal questionnaire. Then with the statistic analysis and non-respondent bias test of 332 valid samples, the research gets the result that there's no difference in data sources.Thirdly, the research empirically analyses the integrated model with reference group influence and TAM by the method of structural equation modeling provided by AMOS17.0 and analyses the influences by two classes of reference group on customers'initial online purchasing decisions by SPSS17.0. The results indicate that reference group not only influence customers'perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness as a external factor, but also continue to influence customers'attitude to use online shops, attitude to buy and actual buying behavior; besides, the influence on customers by traditional reference group is signally greater than that by online reference group, and customers'personality and product's features can adjust some parts of the influence by the two reference groups.Lastly, this paper proposes marketing strategies for e-business operators based on the results of the two empirical researches. The e-business marketers should help customers accomplish their initial online purchase mainly by the usage of traditional reference group influence, and stimulate customers'desire for purchasing online, sharing purchasing experience and repeating buying by clear and different value expression, thus they can make great contribution to band promotion and word of mouth marketing.