Consumer Decision making Process towards online shopping

Need Recognition

In an E-commerce environment, the starting point of the consumer buying decision process is to arouse demand. In addition to the internal and external stimulus in the traditional market, the stimulus of Internet consumers is more from the Internet, which is mainly reflected in the following aspects. One is the network media, which releases a variety of information directly or indirectly affecting the consumer’s demand confirmation.

The second is an online community, where Internet users share their shopping experience in virtual communities such as forums and post bars, as well as product placement in some communities. The third one is the marketing activities of online enterprises, such as online advertising, online bidding and auction and online public relations activities, which are stimulating the desire of consumers to buy. After being stimulated by internal and external factors, consumers will feel that there is a certain gap between their desired and actual needs. If they have a certain purchasing power, they will have a corresponding consumption demand, and in the Ecommerce environment, consumers will have some new demands. The first demand is the interest, which refers to the tendency of people to engage in online activities out of curiosity and the satisfaction of being successful.

The second is personality display, the need for people to use the Internet to show their unique ideas. The last one is gathering communication, and that is consumers want opportunities to come together and interact with others who have similar experiences.

Information Search

Once consumers are aware of a need and are motivated to purchase a particular product or service, they often start searching for the information they need to make decisions in a variety of ways. When shopping online, consumers can use search engines to make a comparison of shopping websites, shopping forums and other tools to effectively collect information, which is more convenient, fast and comprehensive than traditional information collection. Although E-commerce has greatly improved the efficiency of information search and changed the purchasing behavior of consumers, consumers still show high or low enthusiasm in collecting information under the influence of the following factors:

The first factor is product knowledge, which refers to consumers’ understanding of products. Generally speaking, consumers hardly need the information to search for the products they are familiar with or often buy. They make decisions mainly based on experience, and they have a strong search intention when they buy new products. The second factor is product value. Search intention of consumers usually with a positive relationship with the value of the purchased products. For products with low risk and low value, consumers make decisions mainly based on experience, and information search is rarely required. When consumers buy products of high value, information collection becomes particularly important because they are concerned about information asymmetry and greater risks. Therefore, information collection becomes particularly important. The third factor is time stress.

Because gathering information takes a lot of time and effort, consumers’ search intentions are lower when decisions need to be made quickly in a short period of time. The last factor is involvement degree, which refers to how much time and energy consumers are willing to spend in the purchase process. For some complex purchases, most consumers know little about them, so they will spend a certain amount of time collecting information and make multi-faceted selections and comparisons.

Evaluating of Alternative

When consumers get relevant information from different channels, they will analyze and compare various products to choose the most suitable products and services. When consumers choose goods, they will compare the functions, styles, and reliability, prices and aftersales services of similar goods according to a certain evaluation standard. The evaluation and comparison results are based on consumers’ utility value.

For online consumers, the use of the Internet not only greatly facilitates their search for commodity information, but also various comparison shopping websites provide detailed commodity information to help them make a choice as soon as possible.

Purchase Decision

Through choice and judgment, consumers will form their preference or purchase intention for a certain commodity. However, in the process of transformation into actual purchase behavior, it is also affected by the attitude of others and unexpected circumstances. In the E-commerce environment, the extensive and comprehensive commodity information on the Internet will guide consumers to make rational decisions, reduce the probability of impulse purchase, and make online decision-making faster. In addition, besides the traditional factors such as purchase time, purchase quantity, the way to buy is another important decisionmaking factor, that is, online or offline. Many consumers choose to buy their ideal products in the traditional market after collecting information and selecting and evaluating them through the network. The main reason is that consumers will take the following factors into consideration. First, price is still the most sensitive factor for consumers in online shopping. Only when online goods have a greater price advantage compared with the traditional market will consumers be inclined to choose online shopping. Second, risks are factors that need to be considered, mainly including payment risks and privacy risks. Because online shopping usually has to carry on the membership registration, and through online payment and other forms to buy goods. It usually needs to pay in advance to receive goods.

As a result, consumers will worry about their personal information being maliciously stolen, or the risk of account password theft due to Trojan horses and other viruses. Third, trust including the trust of product information on the network and the trust of various promises made by enterprises is another factor.

Post-purchase Behavior

After buying a product, online consumers often compare the actual properties of the product they feel with the expectation of the product to judge the correctness of their purchase decisions and guide the next purchase. If the product performance exceeds expectations, consumers will feel very satisfied; If the actual performance of the product is roughly in line with the expectations, the consumer will feel basically satisfied; If the performance of the product does not meet expectations, consumers will feel disappointed and dissatisfied. Moreover, consumers tend to talk about their feelings to their relatives and friends around them, which further expands the influence of online consumers’ postpurchase feelings. When consumers post relevant comments through various channels such as online forums, QQ groups, virtual communities, blogs, etc., it will even affect the purchase decision behavior of strangers. And the major factors that influence consumer post-purchase satisfaction can be attributed to the following four points. The first point is corporate image and commitment. Generally speaking, an enterprise with a good corporate image and commitment will have high expectations from customers. Therefore, online retailers must act according to their capabilities when making relevant promises, otherwise it is easy to make consumers feel disappointed and reduce their satisfaction. The second point is consumption experience, a kind of overall feeling of consumers in the process of online buying, including the perception of some services provided by network performance merchants, etc. A positive consumption experience will further enhance the satisfaction of consumers. The third point is after-sales service. Whether the return process is convenient, quick and thoughtful will affect customers’ evaluation of purchasing. The last point is safety and reliability. As mentioned above, customers’ consideration of website security performance is an important factor hindering consumers from online shopping. Therefore, most consumers do not have high requirements for it. When enterprises strengthen their security system to reduce customers’ risk perception, customer satisfaction will be greatly improved.