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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the factors influencing Chinese consumers to shop online by exploring the effects of user demographic characteristics and media characteristics on shopping intention. Design/methodology/approach A nationwide online survey of 503 Chinese consumers was carried out to test the proposed conceptual model of online shopping intention using hierarchical regression. The results support most of the proposed hypotheses. Findings Chinese consumers' age, income, education and marital status, and their perceived usefulness are significant predictors of online shopping intention. Research limitations/implications Future research should use actual online purchases as the dependent variable and explore the effects of product characteristics, merchants and intermediate characteristics, as well as environmental influences in online shopping behavior. Practical implications Consideration of individual differences in explaining Chinese consumers' online buying intention could provide a better understanding of users' adoption of the internet as a shopping and transaction channel, as well as enhance an e‐tailer's market targeting and segmentation effectiveness. E‐marketers should incorporate features that can enhance online shopping efficiency. Originality/value Given the tremendous growth of B2C e‐commerce in China, there is a critical need for understanding what drives Chinese consumers to shop online. As one of the few large‐scale empirical studies on Chinese consumers' online shopping behavior, these results will enable e‐marketers to better design their e‐marketing strategies that cater to Chinese consumers' changing needs and lifestyles and improve their online shopping experiences and satisfaction.
Gong et al. (Fri,) studied this question.
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