Research Of Opinion Leaders’ Impact On Online Purchase Intention

Word of mouth(WOM) has always been considered as a key factor that affect consumer buying decision. With the evolution of traditional word of mouth to e-WOM, word-of-mouth information under the environment of network which has faster spread speed, wider influence scope and greater impact power. As an important source and transmission channel of e-WOM, online opinion leaders play significant roles in WOM creation and consumer decision-making. In fact, studies have found that due to online opinion leaders have professional knowledge, deeper involvement with the product, mass interaction with people and high social-economic status, so they have powerful persuasion on consumer decisions, which is more impactful than traditional advertisement and marketer promotions. Based on the development of various applications in web provide a platform for online opinion leaders, also provide channels for influence propaganda.With consumers increasingly tend to use Internet to search for product information, the online opinion leaders become sources of information to consumers with their systematic product involvement and professional.At the same time, with the rapid development of Internet, the rise of e-commerce market has been a strong impact on the traditional commodity market, China is entering an era of national online shopping. Student community is the largest professional group in the net citizen, also the backbone in online shoppers. College students like to advocate personality, pursue fashion and search for related products information before purchase which to reduce perceived risk. So this article selects college students as the research object.Mitchell’s(1999) study showed that consumers prefer the buying programs of lowest perceived risk rather than the one of biggest perceived benefits, the perceived risk is more able to explain consumer behavior. Consumers’ purchasing decisions consist of identifying needs, gathering information, evaluating programs, purchasing decisions, and behavior after purchasing. The perceived risk always through the five stages even though every stage is different. Mitchell thought consumers’ perceived risk is high in the first stage because there is no solution, but perceived risk would be lower in the stage of gathering information. Thus, the perceived risk will be affected by information, and the behavior of consumers will be affected by perceived risk. Therefore, this article is selected from the perceived risk to be studied as a mediating variable.On the basis of literature research, the characteristic of online opinion leaders could be divided into two dimensions, they are individual characteristics and characteristics of network opinion leaders recommended information. Through analyzing the relationship between the characteristic of online opinion leaders, perceived risk, the online shopping intention, the paper puts forward the research hypothesis. In order to ensure the accuracy of the research, the questionnaire uses mature scale. To analyze the collected data, this paper obtained the main conclusions: online opinion leaders specialization, product involvement, relationship intension, visual cues of recommendation have a significant influence on consumers’ perceived risk; online opinion leaders specialization, product involvement, visual cues of recommendation significantly impact on customers’ purchase intention; customers’ perceived risk has a significant influence on consumers’ purchase intention.The results of this research have theoretical contribution of Internet Word of Mouth research,also can help enterprises to identify the key roles of online opinion leaders play in WOM marketing. Enterprises should pay attention to the recognize, mining and train the network opinion leaders, establish the relevant department to manage the negative word of mouth, take measures to reduce the perceived risk of consumers.Although this paper made some achievements but there are still some problems, such as the object of study is single, the size of sample is small and the region is narrow. The paper also put forward the development direction of follow-up study, such as to study on different types of consumers, to expand the scope of the sample size, and to study on different types of products.