Research Of Consumer's Responses To B2C Retailer's Ethics

With the widely spread of online shopping,B2 C website has gained rapid development in recent years.However,at the same time,problems regarding online retailer's ethics keeps emerging.Consumers,when making shopping decisions,pay more and more attention on online retailer's ethics,instead of only focus on the product itself.Consumer's positive perception of a retailer's ethics leads to good shopping experience and higher degree of satisfaction,loyalty,and trust.Especially in the circumstance of service failure,consumers who have a better ethic perception or evaluation of the online retailer,may deal with the failure consequences with more tolerance.Most existing studies,in the perspective of enterprises,theoretically discuss the unethical behaviors of enterprises and the causes and countermeasures.But we are lack of studies that explore enterprise ethics in the perspective of consumers,especially in service failure situation.With the purpose of enriching and complementing the existing researches in online marketing and ethics areas,this study aims to explore B2 C retailer's ethics and its influence in the perspective of consumers.We set up a relational model consisting variables such as consumer's perception of online retailer's ethics(CPEOR),trust,perceived risk,purchase intention,service failure severity,stability attribution,negative word-of-mouth,and switching intention.In addition,we adopt two-step experiment to test the model using the methods of questionnaire survey and situation analogue.Our research has some important conclusions.Firstly,CPEOR is positively connected with consumer trust and purchase intention,while negatively related to perceived risk when buying on the B2 C website.When B2 C company service failure happens,CPEOR also has a mitigative effect on negative word-of-month,switching intention,and stability attribution,which is actually a defensive recovery mechanism.Secondly,the relationship between CPEOR and consumer's negative word-of-month,as well as switching intention,is moderated by service failure severity.The more serious the service failure is,the stronger the mitigative effect of CPEOR is.Finally,we find the mediating role of consumer trust built before service failure through which CPEOR can have indirect effects on negative word-of-month,switching intention,and stability attribution.