The Factors Affect Consumer's Online Information Search Behavior

Consumer is usually search for relevant information to reduce the risk of purchasing before making purchase decisions. Before the internet became universal, consumer can only use traditional media for information search, such as: TV, magazines, newspapers, friends, shops, salespersons, and other channels. But now the Internet has become an indispensable part of our daily lives. According to CNNIC's survey we can find that internet is the majority information channel for most netizens. Based on the literature search, we can see that there are a lot of researches about consumer's information search behavior, but the researches about consumer's online information search behavior have just begun to emerge in recent years. Especially, there is almost no researches about consumers'online information search in our country. Against such a backdrop, it is necessary to study the online information search behavior of Chinese consumers.We have studied previous studies exhaustively for developing a theoretical framework and scale which suit for China's situation and exploring the relations between some variables. After combing the literature, we got the following conclusions:Consumer information search behavior is generally categorized in two ways. The first classification divides this behavior into pre-purchase search and on-going search; second classification divides this behavior into internal and external search. In most cases, reducing purchase risk is the only reason for consumer to search information. But there are two opposite views about whether the internet will bring real benefits to consumer. One is that the Internet facilitates the information search behavior of consumer, thereby increasing the benefits of consumer, while another view is that the emergence of Internet normally makes consumer face the situation of overload, which did not provide consumer with real benefits. Generally, however, the Internet has changed the behavior of consumer information search for its unique characteristics.When we were exploring the influence of various factors on consumer online information search behavior, we found that most researches about this topic are based on the theory of information economics. Similarly, this paper also launched a further discussion along with that theory. According to the theory of information economics we can find that there will be two basic factors affecting consumer's behavior when they search information. The two factors are perceived benefit and cost of online search. Perceived benefit will increase the activities of consumer's online search and perceived cost will reduce the activities. According to this theory and the results of literature review, we assumed that there are several factors affecting the consumer online information search behavior, they are perceived benefit, perceived effectiveness of online search, perceived cost, time pressure, perceived impartiality of online information, perceived ability of search online, internet experience, education and the enthusiasm of shopping.In order to explore more relations, this study developed a questionnaire on the basis of previous studies and conducted a small-scale pre-test, and then revised the questionnaire according to the result of pre-test. Finally, this study formed a formal questionnaire. Because of the objective restrictions, this study sampled in convenience way. The questionnaires were issued at several computer malls and a company. Finally, we received 235 questionnaires which contain 134 valid ones. The questionnaire recovery efficiency is 57%.First of all, this study did the reliability and validity analysis. According to the results we extracted the valid variables and deleted the invalid ones. Subsequently, the author conducted a further analysis of statistics, including the correlation analysis and multiple regression analysis. According to the results of data analysis we can see that perceived benefit, perceived cost and perceived ability to search have the greatest impact on the behavior of consumer online search. Among them, perceived benefit has a positive impact on search behavior, perceived cost has a negative impact on search behavior and perceived ability has a positive impact on search behavior. At the same time, we found that the internet experiences and education also have a positive impact on the search behavior and perceived ability to search online has a intermediary influence between the relation of internet experiences and the online search behavior.According to the above conclusions, this study suggested that companies should express the information about products clearly and pay more attention to the intelligent of website when they choose to use the internet as a marketing communication channel. At the same time, a company who want to do online marketing also should consider that whether the market segment fits the features of online searchers.Because of the limited knowledge of the author, there are still many deficiencies in this paper. I hope future researches will improve these deficiencies and explore more features about consumer online search behavior.