The influence of consumers' perspectives of transaction costs in business -to -consumer markets, their risk -bearing propensity, and the categories of goods purchased on consumers' preference of shopping medium.

摘要

Despite increased Internet usage, transactions conducted by consumers via e-commerce still constitute a very small percentage of total U.S. retail sales. To better understand what influences consumers' choices to shop for products or services on the Internet versus local retail stores, this study tests the influence of consumers' transaction costs, coupled with the risk-bearing propensity of individuals (risk-taking or risk-averse attitude) in a shopping context, and the category of goods involved in the purchase process (such as search or experience goods), which will ultimately influence consumers' preference of shopping medium (such as online or traditional). This research study introduces the construct of consumers' transaction costs as an important predictor of consumers' preference of shopping medium, develops two segregated categories of consumers' transaction costs, namely the individual costs and the social costs, and implements a system of measurement of these costs with regard to how much they matter to individual consumers with regard to their preference of shopping medium. Several pretests were initially conducted to operationalize the variables and their measurement scales, and to validate the manipulation checks employed for the study. The data for the main study was then collected via four versions of the designed and pre-tested survey instrument, employing a between-subjects design, and subject to the appropriate statistical analyses. The results convey that individuals with higher risk-bearing propensity would prefer the online shopping medium, while individuals with lower risk-bearing propensity would prefer the traditional shopping medium. Further, search goods would have a greater tendency to be bought online, while experience goods would have a greater tendency to be bought in-store. These findings bear support to past literature wherein similar results have been found, and serve to strengthen these conjectures. With regard to the effects of consumers' transaction costs, the individual costs and the social costs tend to only influence consumers' preference of shopping medium without providing a sense of the actual choice of medium. Further, the nonsignificant interaction effects of individuals' risk-bearing propensity and goods' categories with consumers' transaction costs imply that these variables do not moderate the impact of transaction costs on consumers' preference of shopping medium. The study then discusses the analytical and theoretical reasoning pertaining to these results, along with the managerial implications which this research bears, and the limitations of this study which could warrant potential future research.