The Research On Factors Influencing Customer Trust In Group-buying Websites

Since2010, the online group buying has been on the rise in China. The number of group-buying websites is very large, so these websites face fierce competition. The industry of online group buying is lack of the policy and industry supervision in China. The entire industry has lots of problems and lacks of the credit system. The customers and the cooperation business stickiness are very low. In the factors restricting the development of group-buying websites, customer trust is a key one to promote the websites to win the competition and get the long-term development. However, the scholars just emphasized the importance of customer trust. They didn’t verify the importance through empirical research and propose which factors influence the customer trust of group-buying websites. In this context, this paper studies on the factors influencing the customer trust of group-buying websites through empirical method and explores the antecedent model.This paper has reviewed the theory of customer trust and the factors influencing the customer trust in network environment at home and abroad. Based on the features of group-buying websites, this paper defines the concepts of online group buying, group-buying websites, customer trust, and customer trust in group-buying websites. Besides, this paper classifies the influencing factors into five categories, which are websites factor, business factor, product factor, third-party evaluation facto and individual consumer factor. This paper takes the individual trust propensity as a moderator variable and builds the antecedent model of customer trust in group-buying websites. Furthermore, this paper makes the questionnaire combining the previous measurement scale and the feature of group-buying websites, and surveys online and offline. Using the SPSS17.0software, this paper analyzes the sample data through descriptive statistical analysis, reliability analysis, validity analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis and variance analysis. Then the paper verifies the antecedent model of customer trust in group-buying websites, tests hypotheses, and establishes the regression equation by step-wished regression method. In the end, this paper put forward the recommendations and measures for the group-buying websites to improve their customer trust based on the data analysis results.The empirical results show that the website factor, business factor, product factor, third-party evaluation factor, and individual consumer factor has a significant positive effect to customer trust in group-buying websites separately. Specifying the five categories, study finds that these specific factors which may influence customer trust are consumer experience, web design, third-party certification bodies, the reputation of website, product quality, business reputation, website services, other consumer reviews, and the consumers’ group buying desires according to the influencing degree from great to light. The consumer experience in the business becomes the most important factor to the customer trust. This requires the group-buying websites cooperate with merchants of high quality and control the consumer process through a series of ways.However, the analysis results show that the website security and the online group buying experience don’t pass the hypothesis testing. This is determined mostly by the security situation of online shopping and the features of the online group buying industry in China. In addition, the moderating effect of individual trust propensity on the customer trust is not significant. But the trust propensity, the web design regulates the effect obviously. So do the trust propensity and the consumer experience.In the meantime, the study finds that gender and age have some influences on the customer trust in group-buying websites. But there is not much difference of the customer trust in different education, occupation and income levels. Generally, the customers trust the group-buying websites relatively. And different websites, different product types and different prices have no effect on the customer trust.