An Investigation Of Chinese Consumers' Decision-Making Style: Based On Internet Shopping Context

The spread of Internet can not only bring several new elements into our daily life but also influence our consumer behavior.Since the population of Internet users in China has already surpassed that of the United States and become the upmost one in the world,there is no doubt about internet shopping would be adopted by more and more consumers,especially younger ones.Currently,there are more than 74 million online shoppers in China and the number is still growing.Since the Consumer Decision-Making Style Inventory,also known as CSI,was initially developed by Sproles & Kendall in 1986,it has gradually become an essential issue in marketing research field.Quite a few scholars have applied this tool to examine certain consumer decision making styles,while most of them were focusing on multi-national or cross-cultural comparison and demographic variables yet the research of applications in different purchasing situations is still insufficient. Therefore,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to mainly focus on discovering the decision making styles of Chinese online shoppers in this new shopping context,including the characteristics and the potential influencing factors.This empirical study takes Chinese online shoppers as the research object,and adopts online questionnaires which focus on online purchasing behavior only.After investigating the traits of the online shoppers' Decision-Making Styles according to CSI,it comes to a conclusion and provides some managerial implications and suggestions for future research on the consumer behavior of online shoppers in China.By using a revised version of original CSI and Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA),this paper demonstrates the existence of nine types of decision making style of Chinese online shoppers,such as novelty and fashion conscious,habitual and brand-preferential,confused by choice and overloaded information conscious,price sensitive and cautious,high-quality conscious,time-saving oriented,brand conscious and price equals quality,impulsive and careless,and hedonistic shopping conscious.Besides,the paper also discusses the relationship between the decision making style and personal characteristics or online consumer behavior.The findings show that there are significant differences in purchasing decisions between female and male internet users.Moreover,the frequency of online shopping,the amount of money being spent and the type of products will considerably influence one's decision making style,especially to those consumers with the traits of novelty and fashion conscious,habitual and brand-preferential,and hedonistic shopping conscious styles.