한국생산성학회

The objective of this study is to identify the attitudes of customers who are using online stores, considering the current transition of customers’ buying activity from conventional offline stores to online stores. To do this, the factors that may have an impact on customer attitudes toward an online store were selected, which included the reputation of the store, website quality and perceived risk, and then the relationship between the factors was also analyzed. To be more specific, the influence of the reputation of an online store was analyzed in terms of the customers’ attitude, website quality and perceived risk. Moreover, a mediation analysis was performed not only on the effect of website quality and perceived risk related with transaction on the online shopping stores, but also on the mediated effect of multiple mediators: the reputation of the online store-website quality-perceived risk- attitude toward the online store. A survey of 557 subjects who had a purchase experience at an online shopping store was conducted, from June to September, 2016, when people are likely to purchase a product or service with high perceived risk or with high involvement. Respondents were reminded of their purchase experiences from March, three months before the survey, until September, the end of the survey. The survey group was accustomed to using computers and mobile phones. We analyzed attitudes of the respondents who had directly purchased a product for their personal or household use. The findings of this survey are as follows. The reputation of an online store is confirmed to have a positive impact both on the customers’ attitude toward the online store and the website quality. The perceived risk has a negative effect on the attitude toward the online store, while the website quality serves to reduce the perceived risk and has a positive influence on the attitude toward the online store. However, the website quality negatively meditates the impact of the reputation of the online store on the attitude toward store. In addition, the mediating effect between website quality and perceived risk is also verified to have been negative. Based on the findings of this research, companies that want to their online stores and ultimately attain their marketing goal are advised to build the reputation of their online stores, improve their website quality and reduce the risk perceived by customers during a transaction process. This would be an effective method of building and maintaining a positive attitude among customers toward an online store. A limitation of this study is that it is focused only on online purchases, and only four variables are used for the Mediateding analysis, even though there are variables other than the reputation of the online store, website quality and perceived risk and attitude toward the store that are worth considering. Moreover, there was no comparison performed between online and offline purchases, and the customers responses based on the distinctive characteristics of online shopping stores were not analyzed. Future research should considering the following. First, a comparative study between online and offline purchases would provide more useful findings from a practical perspective. Second, more diverse variables that can affect customers’ online purchase should be utilized. Third, customers have preference for various online shopping stores, and have used different online shopping stores. Therefore, if a comparative study between these stores were performed, it would provide more useful findings, from practical and academic perspective. Lastly, customers use an online shopping store and demand different levels of service depending on the characteristics of a product or service (involvement, etc.). Therefore, the products and services that customers purchase should be also be studied in the future by subdividing their characteristics.