Impact Of Information Dimensions Of EWOM On Consumer’s Purchasing Intention Under C2C Environment

With the advent of the Internet wave, people’s daily communication and behavior changed significantly. Because of the convenience of online shopping and the richness of selection, people prefer online shopping increasingly. According to the report newly released by China Internet Network Information Center, at the end of 2013, online shoppers have reached 270 million people. Given to such a large population shift from offline shopping to online shopping and the differences between new C2C environment and traditional environment, scholars began to study consumer buying behavior and purchase intention in the new environment. In addition to traditional factors like prices, products and services, consumers under the C2C environment are affected by new facts such as site experience, payment convenience, online interaction, service response, perception of trust on the site and eWOM.Electronic word of mouth is generated accompanied by consumer’s searching and communicating about the information of products and services. Because of the characteristics of the eWOM such as spreading wide, spreading fast and easy to re-spread, its influence is greater than the traditional word of mouth. At the same time, the eWOM also has negativity such as information distortion, manipulation of false information and uncontrollable rumors which can not be eliminated, the positive effect of eWOM is affected. Therefore, the impact of eWOM are more and more attracting scholars concern and attention. Under user’s online shopping process, which facts will let users generate distrust to products even to the sellers and refused to do the shopping? Which facts will well establish user’s trust and eliminate the risk of asymmetric information and decision-making, thereby promoting consumers’ buying behavior? This paper conduct research based on the questions mentioned above.Combing through the literature and research, the identified information dimensions of eWOM includes number, direction, content, length, potency, quality, type, and so on. But there is a potential dimension of eWOM:eWOM timeliness which is beyond adequate study. Therefore we focused on three dimensions of eWOM:quantity, valence and timeliness and study their impact on consumers’ purchasing intention. In addition, the identified facts which affect the impact of eWOM on purchasing intention include the nature of the site, eWOM sender, eWOM recipient, the relationship between the sender and recipient and product type. But there not much research on the impact of brand on the effect of eWOM. In addition, with the development of ecommerce, online shop brands are having important impact on corporate performance. Therefore, we choose the online shop’s brand awareness as a moderator to study whether it has impacts on effects of the three information dimensions (quantity, potency, timeliness).This paper consists of six parts. The first part is Introduction which describes the research background, purpose and meaning. The second part is Literature Review which combs through related theories and literature so as to have a detailed understanding of previous studies. The third part is Study Design building models based on the literature review and proposing hypothesis. The fourth part is Experiment Design, which develops questionnaires, selects subjects and conducts formal experiment. The fifth part collects the data for statistical analysis, testing hypotheses. The sixth part analyses results and summarize and discussions are given.We found that the number, valence and timeliness of eWOM have significant impact on consumer’s purchasing intention. The greater the number of eWOM, the higher the willingness of consumers will be. The greater the valence of eWOM, the higher the willingness of consumers will be. The greater the timeliness of eWOM, the higher the willingness of consumers will be. Moreover, the band awareness of online shop also showed significant moderating effect on the effect of the three dimensions above. When the brand awareness is high, the purchasing intention is higher no matter whether level of the three dimensions above is high or low. In addition, the brand awareness acts as a filter when dimensions of eWOM decrease which keeps the purchasing intention at a relatively high level. At the end of this paper, shortages of this study are discussed and directions for further studies are given.