Research On Consumer Purchase Intension In Fresh Food E-Commerce Industry Based On Trust

As the development of E-commerce,online shopping becomes a common way for ordinary people.Consumers enjoy the convenient services and lower prices when shopping online.Nowadays,the pace of city life has been constantly speed up,there are more and more urban residents would want to purchase fresh and safe farm products with good quality online in a more convenient way.As a result,fresh food e-commerce has emerged.However,the consumers’ cognition of the tangible form of the products they are about to purchase and the buyers’ behaviour have been extremely reduced when they shopping online.In such purchasing environment,consumers are unable to estimate the actual quality of the products by experience,gustation,tactile sense etc.,On the other hand,it is difficult for consumers to build trust to the perishable and nonstandard fresh farm products through the brief introduction and specifications on the website.Therefore,it is very important to study on building consumers trust and increasing their purchase intension for fresh food e-commerce operators.By using the institution trust theory,an empirical study on fresh food e-commerce consumer trust model is conducted in this paper,based on the ability of fresh food e-commerce internal and external institution control,the current development status of fresh food e-commerce,as well as the in-depth literature review and practical experience.A questionnaire has been conducted with the MLF’s customers.The result found that the consumers’ trust under fresh food e-commerce is not built only by the website internal institution control,but also by the third party institution control.Moreover,farm product Safety Assurance and Traceability Mechanism have greater effects on consumer trust than the Service Promise by its internal institution control.At the last part of this paper,with the qualitative interviews with MLF company as a case study,it has given some solutions to help the e-commerce operators to build consumer trust,which included promoting the standardization of China agriculture,reducing the barriers of farm food quality detection for consumers,improving the law and regulations,creating transparent fresh food e-commerce internal institution control,and improving the education and guidance to the consumers.