The Empirical Study On The Relationship Between Social Responsibility Of Online Retailers And Consumer Purchase Intention

As information technology develops rapidly, the e-commerce industry has entered a peak period of growth, especially online retailers, will occupy half of the retail industry in a short time, and its social influence swells. But the social responsibility deficit of online retail industry is worrying. Successive default incidents, such as fake and shoddy products, consumer fraud, customers’ personal information leakage, lack of awareness of tax, damaged consumers’ trust in online retail enterprises and reduced consumers’ willingness to buy products form retail platforms.However many online retailers begin to realize the importance of social responsibility. Good social responsibility performance is a competitive advantage that helps to gain the favor and the trust of consumers, which will ultimately formate purchase intention. So in the new round of competition in the e-commerce industry, corporate social responsibility as an important way to establish links and maintain viscosity between businesses and consumers is meant to be a necessity for the online retailers to upgrate their marketing strategy and improve their marketing motheds.Therefore, setted into an e-commerce context, this study analyzed the socially responsible behavior of online retailers which have the highest degree of contact with consumers and the relationship between responsible behavior and consumers purchase intention. Based on the characteristics of e-commerce, we redefined the concept of corporate social responsibily and redivided its dimension, as well as highlighting the most concerned aspects of CSR by consumers during the questionnaire, to deeply explore how CSR affect the consumers’ willingness to buy online.In addition, as in the process of online shopping, consumers are unable to predict product quality by product contacting, so their purchasing decisions will mainly depend on the trust to the trading platform.And the consumer awareness and support to corporate social responsibility have a great impact behavior.Thus, this paper selected consumer trust as mediating variables, consumer attitudes to social responsibility as manipulated variable.Through empirical study, we found that though the extent is different, each dimension of social responsibility has a certain impact on consumers’ purchase intention, and consumer liability and public liability play a major role. Meanwhile the mediating effect of Consumer trust is significant, while consumers’attitude to corporate social responsibility in this process does not play a regulatory role. For the above findings, this paper presents some suggestions on the public how to promote online retailers to enhance their level of social responsibility and the online retailers how to deal with social responsibility needs.