Understanding Purchase Intention in O2O E-Commerce: The Effects of Trust Transfer and Online Contents

The purpose of this research is to examine the effects of trust transfer and online contents on purchase intention in the online-to-offline e-commerce. A partial least squares based structural equation model was utilized to test the framework of causality and a series of multivariate analyses of variance were conducted to test the effects of online content size. The partial least squares results indicate that trust transfer from online-to-offline platforms to offline merchants, perceived effectiveness of online product reviews as well as perceived effectiveness of numerical ratings positively influence trust in merchants directly and purchase intention indirectly, while perceived effectiveness of online production descriptions shows no significant effect. The multivariate analyses of variance results confirm the positive effects of review number and picture number on customer trust toward merchants and purchase intention. The multivariate analyses of variance results also support the positive effects of review length when a merchant has a high review balance. This research contributes to e-commerce and behavior literature by investigating how trust transfer and online contents engage customers and induce their purchase behaviors in online-to-offline commerce. It also assists leading a better online-to-offline outcome for online-to-offline platforms and offline merchants in the highly competitive online-to-offline markets.