Understanding Consumers’ Privacy Concerns in Online Shopping: Antecedents and Consequences

The impressive prevalence of Internet has contributed a lot to the collection and analysis of personal data, thus posting threats to people’s privacy. This research aims at understanding the antecedents and consequences of privacy concerns within online purchase context by an empirical study based on 113 Chinese online users of young or middle age. Consumers’ perceived vulnerability to disclosure, perceived control over the content and ways of disclosure, and previous experience of online shopping were proposed as three antecedents of privacy concerns online. And the impacts of privacy concerns on consumers’ willingness to disclosure under online purchase circumstances as well as the moderating role of trust towards the websites were examined. The findings of this research suggest that the higher consumers’ perceived vulnerability to disclosure online, the stronger their privacy concerns would be. Contrarily, perceived control over the manner and prior online shopping experience are both negatively related to consumers’ privacy concerns. The examination on the relationships between privacy concerns, trust, and disclosure intentions indicate that when faced with an untrustworthy shopping website, consumers with higher privacy concerns would be less willing to disclose information to the website than consumers with lower privacy concerns would be. Further discussion and business implication on the findings were expatiated in the end of the study