Buy Now,But Consume In The Futher:Investigating The Effects Of Time On Servise Product Purchase At Group Buying Websites

Since the first group-buying website imitating the model of Groupon.com was launched in January of2010, the group-buying market has got rapid development. Just in one year, the number of group-buying websites increased to several thousands. Such fast expansion causes many studies of group-buying websites. The model of Groupon.com could be described the deal-of-the-day, that is, one good product or service product is dealed online through low price in one day. But how deal-of-the-day model could be accepted by so many consumers and sellers in China? Besides, according to a servey of group-buying websites, the service products are the mainstream of the group-buy market. And the limit of consumption is one thing in common of the service products. How the consumption time will affect consumers’ purchase decision on the group-buying websites? We will investigate the time effect on service product purchase at group-buying websites in this paper.After reviewing the existing studies of group-buying at home and abroad, we find that there is few study of the time effect on group-buying while the time effect of decision has been confirmed in psychological research. In this study we will figure out how the time effect on service product purchase at grou-buying websites based on time pressure and Construal Level Theory. Besides, we want to explore how the time affect the effect of the number of participants on consumers’group-buying decision.We design a virtual website to support our study. After experiment and data analysis,we get the following conclusions. Firstly, the shorter of the purchase time, the more consumer participate in group-buying. Secondly, the farther the consumption time, the more consumer participate in group-buying. Thirdly, there is no effect of the purchase number which is different from the others’studies. Finally, the interaction of purchase time and consumption time has a certain impact on the effect of number of participants.What’s more, with post hoc analysis we find consumers will pay more attention to the high level construal information when three factors’ interaction is significant. And the regression of importance of high level construal and low level construal to purchase intention,the importance of high level construal has significant effect on purchase intention while the importance of low level construal not.Our study not only has certain theoretical contributions,but also guides the sellers to make full use of purchase time,consumption time and the purchase number.