Empirical analysis of consumers' channel choice for electronic products: A consumer's perspective

摘要

With rapid development of internet, more and more consumers choose to shop from different channels, such as offline channel and online channel. Some consumers prefer shopping through offline channel because they want to experience the products' quality in person, while other consumers would like to shop online because they care more about the efficiency of shopping. There are several factors that can affect consumers' channel choice, such as channel factors, situational factors, consumers' own factors. This paper aims to analyze consumers' channel choice for electronic products from consumers' own factors. We develop a structural equation model to study consumers' channel choice and investigate the relationships among the indexes via data from questionnaires. We find that (i) both perceived time pressure and perceived channel convenience have positive effects on the attitude towards purchasing electronic products via the internet; (ii) the attitude towards purchasing electronic products via the internet is positively related to the intention of online channel, and negatively related to the intention of offline channel. However, price sensitivity and perceived risk have no significant causal relationships with attitude towards purchasing electronic products via the internet. Further, we divide the sample into two subgroups by gender, using the same method to conduct empirical research. We obtain some valuable results and give some related policies. Then we also divide the sample into two subgroups by career, and we get some useful conclusions.