온라인 외부정보원천의 이용요인에 관한 연구

Abstract

This study seeks to find out what factors influence consumers information seeking behavior by analyzing their behavior in the shopping malls on the Internet, a new medium. It will allow the understanding of the features of the new Internet shopping environment and how consumers behave in such a new environment. The study, moreover, aims to analyze the factors that allow consumers to use the Internet as their tool for purchase, which is an attempt to provide information on developing and vitalizing electronic commerce and to build a better consumer environment. For the study, 206 consumers who have the experience of Internet purchasing are surveyed. As a method of empirical research, frequency analysis is used to understand the general characteristics of samples and the Maximum Likelihood method of LISREL 8.30 (Joreskog and Sorbom 1999) is used to verify hypothesis. It, first of all, selects out the variables considering the reliability and validity of measured variables on each concept, which later are used to estimate the general structured model. The followings are the summary of how the characteristics of consumers and web-sites influence consumers information seeking behavior. First, the study on the characteristics of consumers reveals that there are some meaningful implications in the consumer use of information sources when they find large benefits during information seeking. For consumers who consider the cost of information seeking, the study shows that they usually use the web-sites of product manufacturers. Also, those who use niche portal sites and manufacturers' web-sites take more efforts on information seeking than other consumers, according to the study. Among the six information sources studied, portal sites are most frequently visited by consumers who are most involved in shopping. Those who possess background knowledge most frequently visit niche portal sites and price comparison sites. Second, concerning how the characteristics of web-sites influence consumer use of information sources, it turns out that virtual communities have meaningful impacts on the consumer use of each web-site. Consumers who visit niche portal sites, auction sites and price comparison sites frequently use the sites' communities, blogs, and postings of cyber clubs as reference. The study reveals that consumers have the largest confidence in manufacturer web-sites for product information. For portal and auction sites of the six information sources studied, consumers consider the most the diverse payment methods available in those sites. The study also reveals that the design element is not important for price comparison sites and reactivity is not important for auction sites. The results of this study is expected to provide the understanding of consumers' information seeking behavior in Internet shopping malls and a conceptual framework for online marketing activities.