ISSN 0439-755X
CN 11-1911/B

›› 2006, Vol. 38 ›› Issue (04): 607-613.

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The Consumers’ Risk Sources and Their Influence in B2C E-Commerce

Sun Xiang,Zhang Shuoyang,Chen Yiwen,Wang ErPing   

  1. Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
  • Received:2005-06-27 Revised:1900-01-01 Published:2006-07-30 Online:2006-07-30
  • Contact: Chen Yiwen

Abstract: Abstract
With the development of E-Commerce, it is an urgent issue for consumer researcher to know consumers’ feeling about online shopping and to find barriers of their online shopping. A number of studies have shown that perceived risks tend to stop consumer from online shopping. It is crucial to fully examine consumers’ perceived risks in online shopping in order to understand consumer online behavior and to promote them to adopt online purchasing. The main aim of this research is to test the hypothesis of the cyber-reality interface in online shopping by examining the risk sources consumer perceived in B2C E-Commerce.
Using a combined methodology of qualitative and quantitative research, this study explores the risk sources in B2C (Business to Consumer) Electronic Commerce from consumers’ perspective. The article begins with a brief introduction and literature review of risk reception. In this study, a total of 337 subjects were surveyed by interviews and questionnaires to explore the risk sources consumer perceived in B2C E-Commerce, the dimensions of the consumers’ perceived risks, and the influence of these risk sources on risk perception.
The main findings of this study: Eight main factors were extracted by explored factor analysis (EFA), and they can explain 61% of the total variance. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was then used to confirm the model. The results were as follows: χ2/ DF were 1.38, the RMSEA was 0.05, and the GFI, NNFI and CFI were all above 0.8. The Cronbach α coefficient of the questionnaire for overall perceived risk was 0.83. Risk sources of real guarantee, buyer-seller interaction, online transaction, information searching, autonomy, and product-related were significant influence on the overall perceived risk.
Results suggest that: 1. Consumers perceived a number of risk sources in B2C E-Commerce. Among them, lack of real feeling, necessary information, advertisement bias lie in the stage of information searching; personal information, procedure redundancy, payment system and website fraud lie in the stage of online transaction; delivery time, damage, mistake and personnel lies in the stage of logistics; refusal concern, consumption document, expectation consistency and post-sale service lies in the stage of after-buying. 2. Risk sources in B2C E-Commerce consist of eight components. They are risk in the interface of online transaction, risk of real guarantee, product-related risk, time-related risk, risk of information searching, risk of autonomy, risk of return and change, as well as risk of buyer-seller interaction. 3. Risk sources that have a significant impact on consumers’ overall perceived risk are risk of real guarantee, risk of buyer-seller interaction, risk of online transaction, risk of information searching, risk of autonomy and product-related risk

Key words: B2C E-Commerce, risk sources, consumer

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