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Recently, online shopping has emerged as a growing trend among people worldwide for several reasons, regardless of age and gender. In China, almost every Chinese person uses online shopping to buy things of his or her choice. The prevailing reasons include; first, they can purchase anything at any time just by using our laptops and mobile phones without visiting the stores, as it takes time to go and buy things from different stores. Second, they can buy things online at a lower price than by visiting stores and shopping malls. As the big stores and shopping malls are costly, they can buy the same items online at a lower price from several websites and stores (Han and Kim, 2017). Third, some people feel uncomfortable while interacting face-to-face with the salesman at shopping malls and stores; therefore, they prefer online shopping rather than offline, which is also at their ease. Fourth, online shopping helps to get rid of waiting and facing the crowd of people in big malls and stores (Van Kerrebroeck, Brengman, et al. 2017). They can buy things online at the click of a button.
Past studies have mainly discussed online shopping in the context of specific population and cities, and some have also discussed the factors which influence online shopping and the behaviors of consumers preferring it (Vaghela, Babar, Rasheed, et al. 2014, Fu, Manogaran, et al. 2019). But the factors which affect the online behavior of consumers haven’t been given much attention, which makes it inconsistent to understand. Unlike these studies, we seek to investigate the online shopping behavior of consumers and the factors which affect it. Also, we analyze the mediating effects of purchase intention, which gives new insights to the field. The international students in china have been taken as the study sample to draw the results regarding their online shopping behavior. It is due to the reason that online shopping is prevalent in China, but the foreigners are not very used to it and feel particular hindrance and obstacles because of some factors which we choose to address in this study.
Our study contributes to the literature in multiple ways. First, the constructs of this research did not involve how consumers and influence to shop online. It resolves the inconsistency among online shopping behavior and the factors affecting it. Furthermore, the mediating role of purchase intention adds to the literature on online shopping. Our research also focuses on international students in China. These students (undergraduate and postgraduate, including language programs) feel it is difficult to make online purchases due to some factors such as financial risk, trust, ease of use, and purchase intention. They are afraid of losing their money and maybe wary of online sellers (Suki and Suki 2017). Moreover, many sites are in Chinese, which creates language barriers for many students.