Author(s)

Zhang Menghao, Song Jinlei, Zhuo Lihua

Corresponding Author

Zhang Menghao

Abstract

With the improvement of living standards, cross-border e-commerce platforms, such as Netease koala purchase, Lynx International, foreign wharf and Jingdong global purchase, are developing very rapidly. However, at the same time, cross-border e-commerce platforms face the challenges from private shopping representatives and have many problems in perceived usefulness, ease of use, safety issues and logistics. In order to help these platform enterprises bring better services for consumers and improve their competitiveness, this paper uses questionnaire method to make a deep study on the purchase willingness and its influential factors of cross-border retail products. As a result, this paper finds that consumers on average think the cross-border e-commerce platform to be user-friendly but not have many strengths on the cost and quality compared with purchasing agent or directly buying abroad. And consumers pay more and more attention to brand and quality rather than price when purchasing cross-border retail products. Meanwhile, logistics problems are the consumer’s most worried problems in the process of purchasing. In addition, guaranteed quality, transaction security and speed are the top three reasons why consumers choose to purchase on cross-border e-commerce platforms. Besides, this paper also finds that the age differences, gender differences, educational background differences and monthly expenditure differences exist in cross-border retail products purchase. In addition, educational background and cross-border retail products purchase show an inverse U-shaped curve, and monthly expenditure and perceived usefulness, monthly expenditure and perceived ease of use show inverse U-shaped curves respectively. The possible reasons are discussed in the paper. Finally, some targeted suggestions are given to the cross-border e-commerce platforms.

Keywords

Cross-border retail products, Cross-border e-commerce platform, Influential factors.