A Study On The Effects Of Online WOM Communication On Consumer Purchase Decision Of Electronic Products

Word-of-mouth information is an important source of information that has impact on consumers' attitude and buying behavior and the vast majority of consumers during the procedure of purchase decision-making will resort to the outside world to search for information support. Compared with the formal or organized source of information such as advertisements, consumer often relies more on informal or interpersonal source of information dissemination while making purchasing decisions, and with the rapid development of internet, word-of-mouth information is now available on a greater platform. The persuading influence of traditional word-of-mouth has been widely confirmed by a large number of research results, but on-line word-of-mouth studies still remained few and studies on the influence of on-line word-of-mouth from the perspective of communication combined with the characteristics of the network media is even fewer. Based on the theories of communication and the past studies on traditional word-of-mouth, accordingly this study proposes a research framework, mainly on the assumption that university students take the initiative to surf on line to search for relevant information of products or service before buying electronic products, and discuss the influences of the characteristics of participators of word-of-mouth such as senders, receivers, online word-of-mouth and the channels of online word-of-mouth. This paper employs the method of questionnaire survey and use the SPSS software to statistically analyze the data from the questionnaire survey.The main conclusions drawn in this paper are as follows: (1) the expertise of senders and the strength of the relationship between senders and receivers both have significantly positive influences on the effects of online word-of-mouth, (2) the influence of the profession and innovation of receivers is not significant, (3) the more integral the word-of-mouth is, the more recognition word-of-mouth gets and the more influential it is (4) there is no significant relationship between the authority of the channels and the influences of word-of-mouth, yet the stronger the relationship between websites and receivers is, the more influential the impacts of word-of-mouth on purchasing decisions are.