Exploring the factors affecting online consumer behavior in China:case: Taobao

With the development of electronic commerce, the number of online consumers increase a lot. Consumers are willing to purchase products online since it has great advantages such as saving time, creating convenience and offering more choices. As the biggest and most innovative retail e-commerce market in the world, China possesses 17% online retailing sales from total retail sales in 2017. As the largest e-commerce site in China, Taobao takes over 80% of the e-commerce market share. The purpose of this thesis is to do in-depth exploration of the factors that affecting online consumer behavior in China. Taobao is selected as the case of online shopping platform. A systematic literature review was conducted to investigate the existing articles related to the factors that affecting online consumer behavior when people do shopping on Taobao. Then a qualitative study was designed to examine the factors in depth. An in-depth interview was organized among 10 Taobao users in order to extent the validity of the research. Qualitative content analysis was used as data analysis method and Nvivo was selected as the analyzing tool. Five categories were classified in both SLR and in-depth interview. The commodity factor was examined as one of the most influential factors. It consists of product quality, price, styles and brands. Factors related sellers including seller’s service quality, seller’s website quality, seller’s commercial credits and online reputation are considered as key factors as well. Social commerce activities such as social media sharing, online reviews, online rating and online forum have significant impacts on online consumer behavior. In addition, web quality and functionality of Taobao and some consumer personal factors including consumer’s mood and perceived risks also play an important role. Consumers’ own requirements, the relationship among Taobao and other software applications and the anti-counterfeiting mechanism of Taobao were three new codes found during the research. In conclusion, commodity factors, factors related to sellers, social commerce activities, web quality and functionality of Taobao and consumer personal factors were found as five categories of factors that affecting online consumer behavior when do shopping on Taobao. Quality of products was considered as the most important one. Three pieces of new codes were added by this study. The limitation of the study was discussed and the direction of future research was pointed out