How Do Rating And Sales Volume Cues Influence Consumers’ Online Purchase Behavior? A Research Combined Ouestionnaire And ERP Approach

Online shopping plays an increasingly important role in people’s daily life. However, the online environment makes it harder for consumers’to judge the quality of products as they cannot touch or feel the products directly. Since there are strong information asymmetries between online sellers and buyers, online consumers tend to use exogenous cues as basis for purchase decision. Rating and sales volume are two important and unique cues in the online shopping environment and many existing research have focused on them. However, whether there is interaction effect between them remains unknown. What’s more, the neuro-mechanism of how rating and sales volume influence consumers’ purchase decision jointly is also yet to be discovered.Based on the cue utilization theory, this paper designed two researches. Research one built the research model based on the valence framework and explored how rating and sales volume of products influence online consumers’ behavior, using self-reporting data gather by traditional questionnaire approach. Result of research one show that rating influence both perceived risk and perceived benefit, while sales volume only influence perceived benefit, indicating that the inner mechanism of how rating and sales volume influence purchase intention are different. Research one also proved that perceived risk and perceived benefit influence consumers’ purchase intention.The second research uses the event-related potential (ERP) method to explore the time and spatial course of brain activities when participants making purchase decision according to these two cues. Decision related ERP components (P2, N2, N400, and LPP) are found during the decision process. The behavioral data of ERP experiment showed significant main effect of rating and sales volume. Significant interaction effect was also found in the behavioral data. The ERP data illustrated the categorization process of how participants recognize and differentiate the four rating-sales volume combinations. The main conclusions of this paper are as following.Conclusion1:Online consumers use rating and sales volume to assist their purchase decision. Rating and sales volume influence online consumers’ purchase intention through different path:rating influence both perceived risk and perceived benefit, while sales volume only influence perceived benefit.Conclusion2:When confronted with different combinations of rating and sales volume, online consumers will experience a categorization process. Participants’ time course of differentiating the four experiment conditions and the corresponding latency and amplitude of P2, N2, N400and LPP reflects the time course of their brain activity of online purchase situation. ERP results show that the four conditions are differentiated in different stages of cognition.Conclusion3:In online purchase situation, LPP amplitude of participants is positively related to the valence of the situation. When the product under consideration is of high rating and high sales volume, the LPP amplitude of participants will be significantly higher than other situations.The cue utilization theory and valence framework are both supported by these results. What’s more, this paper offered possible explanation for the inconsistence of cue consistence theory related research. The cognition process of online purchase and time course of cues categorization was also discussed. Chapter6discussed the limitation of this paper and possible future research directions.