An Investigation of The Relationship Between Instant Messenger Adoption and Consumers' Purchase Behavior in Chinese Online Market, through a Trust-based Consumer Decision-Making Model

China’s online transaction reached $ 7.86 billion dollar with 185 million participants in 2011 and Chinese college students played a major role in it (Lu, 2011). The huge potential market provides numerous opportunities for online marketers. Therefore, it is important for e-vendors to understand these consumers’ online shopping behavior. The popularity of online shopping also brought development of new communication tools for online shopping. The Instant Messenger (IM) has been widely adopted by online shopping website as a online communication channel with consumers. The purpose of this research is to assess how this new communication tool can influence consumers’ online behavior and to identify the best type of IM to adopt for e-vendors. Trust is used as the main predictor of purchase intention in the research. The research is based on a valence framework that analyzes how trust is affected by adoption of IM and how trust can influence consumers’ purchase intention. In order to fulfill the research purpose, a questionnaire was developed and conducted through Internet. The results demonstrated that adoption of advanced IM technique is a wise method to build a trustful relationship with consumers. It can not only increase consumers’ trust to the e-store, but also improve consumers perceived communication quality. Through either way, consumers’ online purchase will increase eventually