The Research On Perceived Risk Of College Students’ Online Shopping

In the last decade, with the increasing popularity of internet and the booming ofe-commerce, the development of online retailing has been pushed up and online shoppingwhich is as a new way to shop has been gradually accepted by ordinary people. However,as internet featured with virtuality, dealers with uncertainty and imperceptibility andtransacting process with asynchronism be concerned, the situation of informationasymmetry in between online customers and retailers has been worsened making onlinecustomers sense a potential risk different from the one that sensed under conventionalshopping environment. According to the statistics based on the29thstatistical report of theinternet development in China, released by China Internet Network Information Center, thenumber of online shopping customers and the rate of total utilization, are only0.194billionand37.8%respectively, which indicates active customers are still in minority. Many onlineshoppers terminate their behavior after experiencing objective risk. College students areyoung, stylish, easy to accept new things, they are typical representative of online shoppers,so making a study on their feature of the perceived risk of online shopping and finding outhow different of their perceived risk of online shopping according different characteristicshave a strong a practical significance.Scholars home and abroad believe that there are six kinds of the traditional riskperception dimensions, they are financial risk, function risk, physical risk, social risk, timerisk and psychological risk. On the network environment, there are more perceived risks,just as privacy risk, delivery risk, source risk and service risk. Based on the presentsituation and my experience of online shopping, we take the “Lack of online arbitration” asa measurement of “service risk” in perceived risk and hope to confirm it. As one of themain body of the online shopping, Consumers’ individual characteristics will affect riskperception of online shopping inevitably, so this article put forward seven hypothesis toverify whether different characteristics can affect their perceived risk of online shopping.Different gender, age, education background, net time, online-shopping experience,frequency of browsing the online shopping website and frequency of online shopping arewhether cause differences on perceived risk.Based all of these, we designed the questionnaire. This questionnaire’s objective arecollege students and through two ways of paper version and electronic version. We set out350questionnaires and received responses from296of them. Finally we get280ofeffective questionnaires after eliminating incomplete and invalid ones. The design of questionnaire is expected to be conducted with the foundation above and the aid of a meanvalue analyzing software, SPSS, which produces the features of the perceived riskconcerning college students’ online shopping, and further analysis and discussion are alsonecessary. And verify the validity of the measuring project introduced before which meanis16.25. With the aid of factor analysis five dimensionalities can be concluded in terms ofthe perceived risk of college students’ online shopping, and they are named the risk ofservice assurance, psychological risk of consumers, the risk of disclosing information, therisk of product function and the risk of social appraisal. Among which, the risk ofdisclosing information and the risk of service assurance are valued more when it comes tothe perceived risk of college students’ online shopping, and the former exists only underthe internet environment. The risk of social appraisal and psychological risk of consumers,however, valued less.Through the Independent Sample T-test and One-way ANOVA, five hypotheses areverified and two of them are not. The detailed results are as follows: College students’different gender and net-time caused a different “consumer psychology risk” of onlineshopping; College students’ different education background and online-shoppingexperience caused a different “service security risk” of online shopping; College students’different frequency of browsing the online shopping website caused a different “socialevaluating risk” of online shopping; College students’ age and frequency of onlineshopping do not affect any dimensions of perceived risk of online shopping.Finally, perceived risk is consumer subjective risk, but it is the influenced by theobjective risk of reality. Therefore, if we want to weaken college students’ perceived risk ofonline shopping, efforts should be made to reduce the objective risk. This study putforward following suggestions: Set up dispute arbitration departments of online trade;Improve the service quality of online retailers; Increased consumers’ identification ofonline product and rights protection ability.