Analysis of Consumers'' Choice between Virtual and Physical Channels: Perceived Risk and Information Acquisition Costs Perspectives

• Main Authors: Shiang-Mei Tsai, 蔡湘玫
• Other Authors: Shih-Ju Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2002
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28983287413350601582

碩士 === 國立暨南國際大學 === 國際企業學系 === 90 === As the development of E-Commerce becoming mature, “purchasing via the Internet” is one of the most rapidly growing forms of shopping with sales growth rates that outpace buying through traditional retailing. Thus the virtual retail channel is getting more and more important. However, in those consumers’ channel choice related literature and research, they rarely discuss those different benefits and satisfaction that brought from the two different retail channels. The purpose of this thesis is mainly to understand those determinants of consumers’ channel choice between virtual channel and physical channel from perceived risk and information acquisition costs perspectives. Our study objects are books. After reviewing related literature on perceived risk and information acquisition costs, we gather our sample through mailing questionnaires and Internet questionnaires and analyze our data with Binary Logistic Regression Model to test the influence of “Perceived risk”, “Information Acquisition Costs”, “Personal computer using ability, Internet using ability and experiences ” and “Shopping enjoyment” toward consumers’ channel choice. Empirical results are summarized as following： 1.Financial risk, psychological risk, social risk and convenient risk have no significant influence toward consumers’ channel choice; however, performance risk has significant influence with positive value. Unfortunately, this violates our hypothesis 2. (Hypothese 1~5 are not supported.) 2.The determinant whether consumers own enough knowledge and experiences to make purchasing decisions on themselves has no significant effect on consumers’ channel choice. (Hypothesis 6 is not supported.) 3.Both hypothesis 7a and 7b have significant influences on consumers’ channel choice; hypothesis 7a has positive effect on consumers’ channel choice while hypothesis 7b has negative effect on it. When some consumers treated price related information as the more useful information compared with quality related information while purchasing books, their belief will encourage them to purchase books in virtual bookstores. On the contrary, when consumers think quality information is more important to them, the possibility to them to go to physical bookstore to buy books is getting higher. (Hypotheses 7a and 7b are supported.) 4.Hypothesis 8: “Consumers who perceive higher time pressure toward their purchase will more likely make purchasing through the electronic retail channel” is supported in our empirical results. (Hypothesis 8 is supported.) 5.Hypothesis 9: “Consumers with high product involvement will more likely make purchasing through the physical retail channel” is not supported in our empirical results. (Hypothesis 9 is not supported.) 6.Hypothesis 10: “Consumers who consider in-store shopping to be enjoyable will make purchasing through the physical retail channel” is not supported in our empirical results. (Hypothesis 10 is not supported.) 7.Hypothesis 11: “Consumers who own higher abilities of Internet information handling will more likely make purchasing through the electronic retail channel” is not supported in our empirical results. (Hypothesis 11 is not supported.)