A Study of Uncertainty Factors Affecting Consumers’ Purchase Intention in Online Shopping

Despite improved technologies, procedures, and regulations, consumers are still uncertain about purchasing online. The objective of this study is to understand uncertainty factors in online shopping and their relationships with the consumers’ intention to purchase. For this objective we derived seller anonymity, lack of product transparency, and lack of process transparency as uncertainty factors from previous researches which may affect consumers' perceived uncertainty on online shopping. Then, a causal model was developed to conceptualize the relationships between these uncertainty factors as antecedent variables and consumer’s intention to purchase as consequent variable with perceived uncertainty as an intermediary variable. Purchase involvement was used as a moderating variable on the relationship between perceived uncertainty and the intention to purchase online. The model was tested empirically to find meaningful relationships among these variables. The findings indicate that all antecedent variables affect perceived uncertainty significantly and perceived uncertainty negatively affects consumers’ intention to purchase. Moreover, the results of analysis show purchase involvement has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between perceived uncertainty and intention to purchase online.