| With the rapid growth of internet users, as well as the improvement of online shopping environment, online shopping has become an important shopping channel for Chinese consumers. However, the online shopping has the characteristics that the shopping decision separated from the consumer experience, which increases the consumer's shopping risk. Internet retailers have set up a lenient return policy to solve the problem, but it will increase the cost of online retail, while it brings convenience to consumers. Therefore, how to solve this paradox has become a very important issue.This paper solves this paradox by studying the effect of online retailers return policy on consumer's willingness to pay for a price premium. The paper developed a conceptual model about the impact of the e-tailer's return policy on willingness to pay for a price premium based on signaling theory and equity theory. Specifically, based on reviewing the relevant literatures, this paper select product type and product involvement as mediating variables, perceived quality and perceived risk as moderator variable. To assess this model, using 2(Return Policy Leniency: restricted vs. lenient) x 2(Product type: search goods vs. experience goods) x 2(Product value: high vs. low) experiment, designing 8 different experimental situations. The data was analyzed with the AMOS 22.0 and SPSS 22.0. The conclusions are as follow:(1)The latent return policy make consumers produce higher perceived quality and lower perceived risk, thereby increasing consumers' willingness to pay a price premium.(2)The effects of a return policy on perceived quality and perceived risk are stronger for experience goods than for search goods.(3)The effects of a return policy on perceived quality are stronger for high product involvement consumers than for low product involvement consumers,but there is no significant difference in the perceived risk.Finally, some theoretical and managerial implications of the results were given. |
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