Chinese and Finnish Undergraduates’ Online Shopping Behaviour

Abstract

The main goal of the thesis was to recognise similar and different characteristics of online shopping behaviour between Chinese and Finnish undergraduates. Additionally, this thesis would give meaningful proposals for merchants and managers on offering better online marketing.

This thesis report was conducted in both theoretical and practical parts. The theoretical parts include marketing research and online shopping consumption behaviour. The study describes the marketing research progress, consumer behaviour model, TRA, TPB and Maslow´s hierarchy of needs to help understand the consumption behaviour. Additionally, the thesis gives specific definition of online shopping consumer behaviours and describes its process. The practical parts describe findings of the online survey among Chinese and Finnish undergraduates. The quantitative research method was conducted in this study. The online link of questionnaire was sent to Chinese and Finnish undergraduates by email.

The results of this study reflect that Chinese and Finnish undergraduates’ online consumption behaviour has the following relatively similar and different characteristics: Motivation of Chinese undergraduates’ online shopping consumption is timesaver; Motivation of Finnish undergraduates’ online shopping consumption is easy operation. Chinese and Finnish undergraduates’ consumption concept is rational and reasonable. Participation rate of their online shopping consumption is very high, but expenditure on online shopping is relatively low. Price and Products quality are the most important two influential elements of Chinese undergraduates’ decision-making on purchase in an online shopping process; Price and Transaction (payment) security are the most important two influential factors of Finnish undergraduates’ decision-making on consumption online. Most Chinese undergraduates prefer to purchase on shopping websites, but most Finnish undergraduates choose E-store/official websites to purchase products.