• Asia Marketing Journal
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.75-97
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• 2013

While good return policies are suggested as one of the critical services for e-commerce, ambivalence between the burden of the cost and shoppers' satisfaction may prevent e-tailers from increasing their level of leniency. Based on the S-O-R model, this study has attempted to develop a grounded theory to explain how lenient return policies shape online shoppers' perceptions and responses, with a focus on cultural influences in the relationship. In order to check the cultural effects of the lenient return policy, thirty two female and eleven male undergraduate students in South Korean shoppers, who are accustomed to strict return policies, participated in the semi-structured interview. A series of open-ended questions were designed to explore consumers' reactions toward four different levels of the lenient return policy: from the strict type in South Korea to the lenient type in the U.S. Using qualitative research methods, this research has defined three types of dimensions of lenient return policy: return possible period, complexity of progress, and other restrictions. While previous researchers did not pay much attention, the last dimension, other restrictions, is shown to be the most significant in influencing online shoppers' perceptions, especially in South Korea. Also, the impacts on online shoppers' perceptions from the three types of sub-dimensions of return policy were somewhat different. Whereas a longer return possible period was considered more favorable, a medium level of complexity and restrictions were considered more desirable. In summary, this result showed that shoppers in Eastern cultures, i.e. South Korean online shoppers, seem favorable to a medium level of lenient return policies, while allowing for taking precautions against possible fraudulent behaviors and setting other restrictions. Therefore, most of retailers in South Korea recommended that e-tailers who adopt the most lenient return policies raise the bar to guard ethical shoppers from fraudulent users. Next, lenient return policies can enhance ease of use, usefulness, affect, and trust while relieving perceived risk, which is connected to intention to purchase, satisfaction, and loyalty. Interestingly, lenient return policies are more likely to change the behavioral responses of online shoppers, such as return and purchase, rather than change their attitudes or beliefs such as image, satisfaction, and loyalty. This tendency can be seen more clearly in the direct influences of return policy on responses. The reaction to lenient return policy is mostly the intention to return or to purchase. This suggests that return policy serves the e-tailers as a powerful tool in increasing online shoppers' purchase intention at the moment of purchase. Therefore, e-tailers who plan to expand their market to eastern countries, including South Korea, have to build a shield of restrictions around their lenient return policy, rather than immediately applying their original liberalized return policy. Also, e-tailers in South Korea need to review their strict and undifferentiated return policies to deal with the unsatisfied reactions of online shoppers toward their normal return policies. Although the present study was confined to the return policies currently being practiced by popular e-tailers, it would be worthwhile to develop effective return policies separately for each country, especially South Korea, keeping the culture of the relevant country in mind.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.15-40
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• 2008

With the explosive growth of the Internet, Internet shopping malls have become recognized as one of the major purchasing channels for consumers, as well as one of the competitive distribution channels for companies that allow them to contact with customers without intermediaries. It has motivated information systems(IS) researchers to examine the factors influencing consumer behavior and the purchase decision process in the context of Internet shopping malls. Despite the extensive research that has been conducted on the purchase decision process of consumers in online shopping malls, the results have demonstrated a need for further understanding of consumer behavior due to the unique features of virtual space and the characteristics of online consumers. Previous studies from marketing and consumer behavior domains have suggested that the concept of involvement plays an important role in explaining consumers' purchase behavior. Despite the critical role of involvement and the explosive growth of e-commerce, little research has examined the role of involvement in the Internet shopping mall context. With this motivation, this study has two research objectives. First, it introduces and tests an theoretical model capable of better explaining consumers' intention to purchase in the Internet shopping mall context. The proposed model extends and integrates existing models on purchase intention by incorporating purchase experience, innovativeness, and perceived self-control as the consumer factors, along with perceived risk, information provision, and perceived price as the Internet shopping mall factors. Second, this study examines how involvement differences may affect consumers' intention to purchase. For this purpose, two factors from involvement theory, involvement type and involvement level, are introduced into the research model as moderating variables. In order to test the proposed model, the overall approach employed was a field study using the structural equation model. We developed our data collection instrument by adopting existing validated questions wherever possible. All question items were measured with a seven-point, Likert-type scale, with anchors ranging from 'strongly disagree' to 'strongly agree.' Two IS researchers reviewed the instrument and checked its face validity. We collected empirical data for this study over a period of two weeks from subjects who had purchase experiences through Internet shopping malls. A total of 473 complete and valid responses were obtained. We carried out data analysis using a two-step methodology with AMOS 4.0. The first step in the data analysis was to establish the convergent and discriminant validity of the constructs. In the second step, we examined the structural model based on the cleansed measurement model. The empirical results partly support the proposed model and identify the moderating effect of involvement differences. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed, along with its limitations.

• Proceedings of the Korean Institute of Information and Commucation Sciences Conference
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• 2015.05a
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• pp.207-209
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• 2015

Recently, with the economy and the information communication technology developed, the smartphone market grows continuously. The market outlook on the wireless rechargeable technology grows rapidly so that the market size is increased about six times bigger than that of the last year, and it will grow about 18 billion dollars in 2014. Because of that, as the interest on this area out focused, many kinds of technology and new product are being exploited in this field. Participants of this study were 76 mobile users in Gyeongnam and Jeonbuk province in accordance with convenience sampling. Most of the respondents about 88 percent, the wireless charger may be answered to be able to explain what it is. Also, about 70 percent of the respondents, is time to replace the future of smart phone, answered by selecting a product in consideration of the wireless charging. Based on these findings, several theoretical and practical implications were suggested.

• Asia pacific journal of information systems
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• v.19 no.1
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• pp.147-165
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• 2009

Virtual community(VC) will increasingly be organized as commercial enterprises, with the objective of earning an attractive financial return by providing members with valuable resources and environment. For example, Cyworld.com in Korea uses several community services to enable customers of Cyworld to take control of their own value as potential purchasers of products and services. Although initial adoption is important for online network service success, it does not necessarily result in the desired managerial performance unless the initial usage is continuously related to the continuous usage and purchase. Particularly, the customer who receives relevant online services and is well equipped with online network services, will trust the online service provider and perceive less risk and experience more activities such as continuous usage and purchase. Thus, how to promote continued online service usage or, alternatively, how to prevent discontinuance is a critical issue for VC service providers to consider. By aggregating a wide range of information and online environments for customers and providing trust to its members, the service providers of virtual communities help to reduce the perceived risk of continuous usage and purchase. Drill down, online service managers realize that achieving strong and sustained customers who continuously use online service and purchase on it is crucial. Therefore, the research into this online service continuance will identify the relationship between the initial usage and the continuous usage and purchase. The research of continuous usage or post adoption has recently emerged as an important issue in the IS literature. Individuals' information systems(IS) continuous usage decisions are congruent with consumers' repeat purchase decisions. The TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) paradigm has been strongly confirmed across a wide range from product purchase on EC to online service usage contexts. The analysis of IS usage based on TAM has proven to be successful across almost online service contexts. However, most of previous studies have focused on only an area (i.e., VC or EC). Just little research has tried to analyze the relationship between VC and EC. The effect of some factors on user intention, captured through several theories such as TAM, has been demonstrated. Yet, few studies have explored the salient relationships of VC users' EC acceptance. To fill this gap between VC and EC research, this paper attempts to develop a research model that extends the TAM perspective in view of the additional contributions of trust in the service provider and trust in members on some factors that affect EC and VC adoption. In this extension, we applied the TAM-to-TAM(T2T) model, and analyzed the transfer effect of trust between these two TAMs. The research model was empirically tested on the context of a social network service. The model was to extend TAM with the trust concept for the virtual community environment from the perspective of tasks. By building an extended model of TAM and examining the relationships between trust and the existing variables of TAM, it is aimed to explain a user's continuous intention to use VC and purchase on EC. The unit of analysis in this paper is an individual user of a virtual community. The population of interest is the individual with the experiences in virtual community. The data for this paper was made available via a Web survey of VC users. In total, 281 cases were gathered for about one week, but there were some missing values in the sample and there were some inappropriate cases. Thus, only 248 cases were finally analyzed. We chose the structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses and it is better suited for explaining complex relationships than the other methods. In this test, AMOS was used to test the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Noticeable results have been found in the T2T model regarding the factors affecting the intention to use of virtual community and loyalty. Our result showed that trust transfer plays a key role in forming the two adoption beliefs. Overall, this study preliminarily confirms the salience of trust transfer in online service.

• Asia-Pacific Journal of Business Venturing and Entrepreneurship
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• v.16 no.4
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• pp.195-209
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• 2021

According to the 2019-2020 social media usage survey conducted by the Seoul e-commerce center, 5 out of 10 consumers have experienced shopping through social media. The cost of traditional advertising media has been reduced and advertising spending on social media has risen by 74%, indicating that social media is becoming a more important marketing element. While the number of users of social media has increased and corporate marketing activities have increased accordingly, research has been conducted in various aspects of marketing such as user motivation for social media, satisfaction, and purchase intention. There was no subdivided study on the differences in the social media usage frequency of consumers in actual purchasing behavior. This study attempted to identify differences in consumer characteristics by cluster in the agrifood purchase situation by grouping them by type according to the frequency of use of social media for consumers who purchase agri-food online. Product involvement, product need, and online purchase channel Consumer characteristics such as demographic distribution, perceived risk, and eating and lifestyle in each cluster were checked for the three agrifood purchase situations including choice, and types for each cluster were presented. To this end, questionnaire data on the frequency of social media use and online agrifood purchase behavior were collected from 245 consumers, and the validity of the measurement variables was secured through factor analysis and reliability analysis. As a result of cluster analysis according to the frequency of social media use, it was divided into three clusters. The first cluster was a group that mainly used open social media, and the second cluster was a group that used both open and closed social media and online shopping malls; The third cluster was a group with low online media usage overall, and the characteristics of each cluster appeared. Through regression analysis, the effect on product involvement, product need, and purchase channel selection when purchasing agri-food online through each of the three clusters was confirmed through regression analysis. As a result of the regression analysis, the characteristic of cluster 1 in the situation of purchasing agri-food online is a male in his 30s living in a rural area who has no reluctance to purchase agri-food on social media or online shopping malls. The characteristics of cluster 2 are mainly consumers who are interested in purchasing health food, and the consumer characteristics are represented. In the case of cluster 3, when purchasing products online, they purchase after considering quality and price a lot, and the consumer characteristics are represented as people who are more confident in purchasing offline than online. Through this study, it is judged that by identifying the differences in consumer characteristics that appear in the agri-food purchase situation according to the frequency of social media use, it can be helpful in strategic judgments in marketing practice on social media customer targeting and customer segmentation.