| Product trial was a marketing tactic to improve the product popularity and public receptiveness. With the rise and development of the e-business industry, the online free trial became one of the most popular online marketing tactics. This study was supposed to focus on the impact of the free trial activity on the product sales in the context of the e-business and analyze the influence factor of each trial stage. The study imported product evaluation, e-shop service evaluation score, e-shop logistics evaluation score, product price as the control variables referring to the theory of product trial marketing such as cannibalization theory, advertising marketing theory, E-WOM theory and put the second-hand data of the TaoBao trial center as database. The study found out that the online free trial activity had the feature of product trial and advertising. In the stage of forecast and apply, the activity will restrain the development of sales quantity or make the sales quantity decline because of the cannibalization effect. On the opposite, when the trial activity ends(the deadline of committing trial report is over), the sale quantity has a progressive development owing to the full release of the advertising conversion effect, product trial acceleration effect and expanding effect and e-WOM effect. As a result, the trial activity had a remarkable positive influence on sale quantity. On the other side, the product attribute and e-shop attribute had an interaction effect with the trial activity. |
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