Stimulants of Online Shopping Behaviour among Chinese Millenials in China

To survive and prosper in the China, online companies must design their operational platforms to organically adjust to changes in consumer shopping behavior. The study investigated the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that influence the online purchasing behavior of Chinese millennials. A cohort of university students from selected parts of the Jiangsu province provided the sample of study. Consistent with the extant literature, the research confirms that millenials are influenced by several external factors, demographic factors, personal characteristics, and vendor/service/product characteristics and websites qualities when buying online. The economic, socio-cultural, technological, and legal considerations where the main external factors that influences online shopping behavior of Chinese millenials, internet knowledge, concern for security, need specificity and disposition to trust were the main personal characteristics identified. The study also found significant association between vendor services such as real existence of the store, store reputation, store size, reliability, assurance (seals, warranties, news clips) and use of testimonials/reference have association with millennials’ purchasing intention. Similar characteristics were identified for product characteristics, service quality factors and website quality and each of these is statistically significant. Gender was determined to moderate the effect of all the factors on online shopping behavior.

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