A Study Of How Payment Methods Affect Consumer Purchase Decision Based On The Theory Of Mental Accounting

Integral programs exerted great influence on customer's purchasing behavior with constant improvement and wide application of customer reward program. According to previous studies, varied attributes of income sources in mental accounting often generated different purchasing intentions and behaviors. Guided by such theory, this paper by analyzing different attributes of integrals and cashes explores how integral payment and cash payment influenced customer's purchasing intentions and effect mechanism. Most experts discussed how points programs affect customers'loyalty, how customers made purchase decisions in sales circumstantial from perspective of cash, discount, coupon and so on. Therefore, there are a few studies that researched how cash payment or integrals payment affect customers' decision-making in different inner mechanism. Therefore,based on the theory of mental accounting, this paper discussed how different payment influenced purchase intentions, inner mechanism and adjustment, where product itself and discount played mediating roles and provided suggestions for optimizing integral programs to improve purchase intentions.With situational experiment and data analysis, part of the hypothesis was validated. This paper by researching main effects and mesomeric effects verified the mediating effects of commodities' attributes. Results showed that different payment modes result in varied attention, which further affects purchasing intentions. Customers tend to focus on discounts in integral payment but not commodity itself in integral payment, however,in cash payment the contrary is the case. Furthermore, this different is more obvious in hedonic commodities than it in utilitarian commodities, where commodities' attributes and uncertainty of reference price plays a mediating role between payment modes and purchase intentions.This paper made theoretical contribution to researches about mental discount in integral payment and how consumers' mechanism affected purchase intentions. Furthermore, by researching measurement and management of integral mall, this paper provided suggestion to companies how to improve consumers' purchase decision, which also made certain practical contribution. However, there are still limitations. Researches about attention mainly focus on product itself and discount, however, in reality attention could be distracted by more dimensions. Therefore,besides two payment modes as integrals and cash, further research could research other dimensions about consumers' attention, such as other payment modes and uncertainty of prize.