Experimental Research On Factors Affecting Consumers’Online Shopping Decision-making

As a new way of shopping, online shopping has developed rapidly and has become an important driving force in promoting economic development in China in recent years. There is still great potential for development for e-commerce. Only when the online retailers have more accurate grasp of consumers, can they guide consumers to participate in online shopping properly. And as online mode of shopping is quite different from the traditional mode, the research on factors affecting consumers’online shopping decisions is of great significance. Through an experiment, we make an empirical research and analysis on the factors that may affect the online shopping decision-making, including goal-specificity, the online shopping experience and products involvement.This paper first describes the background, meaning and purpose, as well as the basic arrangement of the chapters, and combed the previous theories, including cognitive decision theory, theory of goal-setting and the involvement. Based on the literature reviewed, assumptions:goal-specificity, the online shopping experience and products involvement as well as their interactions will have effect on the efficiency of online shopping decision-making.Based on this idea, we have organized the experiment. We let the participators do virtual shopping in the laboratory computer. Using screen-recording software, we record their whole shopping process and gather other information in the form of questionnaires and interviews after the virtual shopping. We select goal-specificity and online shopping experience as independent variables, efficiency of online shopping decision-making as the dependent variables. Then we make an analysis on the effect of the two factors and their interactions on the results of online shopping. Meanwhile, in order to explore the influence of involvement in the shopping results, we select the phone and hotel as the subjects to purchase, which have different degree of involvement. We use whether opening of online banking and online shopping spending to describe the shopping experience. We choose the total time, the width of the tree and the proportion of successful path time to describe the shopping results.Unilateral analysis of variance and multi-factor analysis of variance with goal-specificity and the shopping experience on shopping results. For mobile phones, goal-specificity did not affect the shopping results.The total time, the width and the proportion of successful path in the tree of participators who have opened online banking are distinctly smaller than that of ones who haven’t. As the spending increases, the total time and the width was significantly smaller. For the hotel, participators with specific task spend distinctly more time than ones with unspecific task. We explain the above conclusion with cognitive decision theory and theory of goal-setting.Next, we compare the results of purchase of the two subjects. For subject with high involvement(mobile), the shopping experience has a greater effect on shopping results; For subject with low involvement (Hotel), task clarity has a greater effect on shopping results. This paper attempts to explain this phenomenon with theory of involvement.Through the empirical research,we analyze the impact of goal-specificity, online shopping experience, products involvement on the decision-making.We explore the cause and mechanism of the analysis, which may help the online merchants to better understand the decision-making of online shoppers.