Influence of Online Retail Service Quality on Consumer's Risk Perception——The Moderated Effect of Third Party Logistics' Priming Information

In recent years,with the quick progress in Internet and the boom of E-Commerce,more and more internet users in China are accustomed to online shopping,which spawned a large number of online retail businesses.According to the existing researches,perceived risk is the main reason for restricting consumers' online shopping.Therefore,for the online retail enterprises among who the competition is growing homogeneous,improving the quality of service will reduce consumers' perceived risk and thus be an effective way to promote online shopping.However,previous researches rarely focused on the relationship between perceived risk and the quality of service in network environment. Besides,further researches showed that as the competition among online retailers grew homogeneous,the level of logistics distribution became an important that affected the competitiveness of online retail businesses while the concerns about logistical issues became one of the main factors that held back online shopping as well.For now,most of the domestic online retail enterprises outsource logistics distribution,which is their non-core business,to third-party logistics(TPL) companies and form strategic alliance with them.However,there are numerous third-party logistics companies that vary in service quality.The positive and negative information TPL companies have revealed will greatly influence consumers' evaluation of the quality of online retail businesses' service and thereby affect the level of perceived risk.Therefore,this paper focus mainly on the following three aspects:(1) the relationship between the quality of online retail businesses' service and consumers' perceived risk;(2) the interactive effects of the quality of online retail businesses' service and information TPLs have revealed on consumers' perceived risk;(3) changes in the level of consumers' perceived risk caused by different quality of online retail businesses' service with different primal information of TPLs.Based on the previous researches,this paper takes college students who are experienced in shopping online as its research samples,tests the research hypothesis through the scene imitate method,and makes suggestions regarding to management and marketing. According to our empirical results,the quality of online retail businesses' service has negative impact on consumers' perceived risk in the network environment.Moreover,the interactive effects,what the quality of online retail businesses' service and primal information of TPLs have on consumers' perceived risk,show following rules: for those online retail enterprises who have high quality of service,third-party logistics' positive primal information has limited effect on further reducing consumers' perceived risk,while the negative primal information of third-party logistics can significantly increase consumers' perceived risk;for those who have low quality of service,third-party logistics' positive primal information can significantly reduce consumers' perceived risk,while the effect of third-party logistics' negative primal information on increasing consumers' perceived risk is not significant. Based on the empirical results,we give the following suggestions for managerial practices and marketing: First of all,online retail businesses must pay attention to both enlarge the extension and deepen the intension of service quality.In order to improve the quality of service,online retailers should not only emphasize the intangible service products,but also focus on other aspects contained in service quality,especially on improving the visibility,empathy,reliability,and responsiveness of service.Secondly,online retail businesses should attach importance to the supervision of and the cooperation with their allies.By setting up the norms of supervision and cooperation in alliance,online retailers could establish emergency mechanism of alliance and seize the opportunities to optimize the cooperation among allies.Finally,online retail businesses ought to distinguish the hygiene factor of service quality from the motive factor of service quality.On the condition that the hygiene factor of service quality is guaranteed,online retail businesses could continuously exploit the motive factor of service quality,strengthen the awareness of dynamic management,and enhance the innovation of service quality.