Clues Preference And Information Processing Strategy Of Consumers' Purchase Decision In Online Shopping

With the development of the times, the emergence of online shopping has made buy environment and purchase method change. In the online shopping context, consumers purchase decision strategy has become a major topic of concern. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the consumers who have different characteristics make purchase decisions in different shopping situations and what clues they will follow. At the same time, this study will also understand characteristics of consumers'information processing.There are three parts in this paper. Researches of online purchase decision are reviewed in the first part. Those researches show that online purchase decision is a process of information searching and risk decision-making. And several questions are raised in this part. Two studies are contained in the second part.The first study shows that the status of the current university students' online shopping and factors which influence consumers'online shopping, which use an investigation. There are two experiments contained in the second study. Using the process tracing method, which is called Information Display Board, the first experiment is designed to test the influence of individual's risk preference and the type of commodities on decision makers' information processing strategy and clues preference for choice. The result reveals that (1)under high involvement purchase circumstances, risk-seeking individuals use heuristics to make purchase decisions, while risk-neutral and risk-hating individuals are inclined to use complete information processing strategies;(2) Under low involvement purchase circumstances, no matter what attitude they hold to risk, the individuals are inclined to use complete information processing strategies, and difference is not significant; (3) most of the consumers pay more attention on some clues, which include credit, price, quality and information security; (4) clues preference for risk-seeking individuals is more obvious than risk-neutral and risk-hating individuals. In the second experiment, the influence of risk perception is examined. With the method of Information Display Board, the result shows that (1) under high involvement circumstances, low risk perception individuals use heuristics to make purchase decisions, while high risk perception individuals are inclined to use complete information processing strategies; (2)Under low involvement circumstances, the difference of information processing strategies between low risk perception individuals and high risk perception individuals is not significant; (3) clues preference for low risk perception individuals is more obvious than high risk perception individuals.In the end, the whole study is reviewed and the practical values are pointed out. Then the deficiency in this study and the expectation in the future are put forward.