The factors that influence customer's purchase intention in a Chinese online C2C platform : Taobao

Abstract

As online shopping becomes more and more popular these years, more and more online platforms appear with rapidly size growing. There are three main types of online platforms, which are B2C, C2C and mixed. In European, Allergro, Asos, Cdiscount, Cel, DaWanda, Emag…. They rapidly growth and attract thousands of customers, While in Asian, the growth of e-commerce is just the beginning. Alibaba, AliExpress, Flipkart, GittiGidiyor, HipVan, a big amount of e-commerce platform is growing fast. In China, the high population give the great convenient for the development of e-commerce. Beside the m trend, C2C platform is an interesting part: not only include industry and business, the platform aims to enroll more small and middle business, or even, individual sellers. they share the market cake to civilian, which shows a whole new way for people: market barriers are decrease, people are free to join the market. It is deserved to research C2C platforms for its potential value. There are many researches addressed some of the customer’s influence factors in e-commerce, but there are rarely literatures that using Taobao, which is a pure C2C platform, as material to research. In this research, three factors includes Trust toward seller, Online review credibility and Advertisement were tested to confirm the relationship with customer’s purchase intention, while two factors includes Return guarantees and Continuous purchase behaviors are tested to confirm the relationship with customer’s trust towards sellers. finally, Trust toward sellers and Advertisement were confirmed to positively influence customer’s purchase intention, and Continuous purchase behavior and Return guarantees were confirmed to positively influence customers Trust to the sellers, however, Online review credibility was not successfully confirm to have significant correlation with customers’ purchase intention. the paper reveals the key implications for further study and shows limitation that need to be cover in further work.