Keywords

1 Introduction

According to the 2019 research report of Chinese community users and webmasters published by IRESEARCH Consulting Group, by Q1 2019, the monthly coverage of Chinese online communities was 370 million people, the monthly browsing time was 300 million hours, and the monthly visiting page number was 15.85 billion pages. The rapidly develo** network virtual community has a large scale of users, and at the same time has a good user stickiness and user access depth, which is very conducive to the development of other forms of new applications or network marketing, in order to create better market value. Traditional community enterprises almost all rely on selling advertising to survive, lack of an effective way to convert community popularity into commercial value. With the continuous development of internet applications, a new “community + e-commerce” model has become a new way for many community enterprises to survive. TIEXUE has established an e-commerce platform for TIEXUE’s conduct. 80% of the company’s turnover comes from e-commerce, while traditional advertising accounts for less than one-fifth of the business. Table 1 shows more examples of community enterprises establishing e-commerce transaction platforms. Another situation is that e-commerce enterprises establish communities to promote the communication and purchase of members, such as TAOBAO community, PDD community.

Table 1. Examples of virtual communities establishing community trading platforms
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Community users communicate with each other, release information and obtain information, which is a long-term process to establish a certain circle of discussion. Circle members trust each other based on common topics. This sense of trust is key to sustaining community development. But when it comes to community trading platforms, will the trust of community users be transferred correspondingly? This is trust transfer. Although a large number of literatures at home and abroad have studied online purchasing behaviors from the perspective of consumer trust, these studies have all considered consumers’ trust in online and mobile stores under online and mobile environments, and less considered the problem of users’ trust in virtual communities turning to the trust of community shop** platforms. Community users sharing knowledge and information together for a long time will have a certain impact on their purchasing decisions. Research shows that about 61.7% of community users make purchase decisions based on other people’s opinions. A virtual community is an information exchange platform where users can obtain the consumption experience of other members. For example, when many people buy a certain product or service, they will look at other consumers’ comments on the product or service. Through this sharing of information to reduce their own concerns. However, the influence of information sharing is based on the judgment of users on the perceived value of information. Users only need to pay a certain amount of time, physical strength and energy to participate in the virtual community, but they need to pay the monetary cost for shop** and bear the possible risks in the transaction process. That is, community users often consider perceived risks and costs when they turn to community trading platforms. Therefore, based on trust transfer theory, information theory and risk cost, this paper builds a virtual community users into the community trade influence model, the research community trust whether impact on community trust trading platform, how the user’s trust and perceived risk value and cost effect on purchase intentions together, in the hope of promoting the transformation of community of users to the community trade.

2 Study Models and Hypothesis

For information value, from the perspective of consumers, it is not defined by commercial enterprises, but by the value of information perceived by consumers, that is, perceived value. Zeithaml proposed the concept of perceived value as early as 1988. He described perceived value as the evaluation of the overall utility of a product or service made by consumers after weighing and comparing the benefits they feel with the costs they pay in the process of acquiring the product or service [1]. Spreng also believes that customer perceived value is the customer’s expectation of the outcome of the purchase from the perspective of future gains and losses [2]. Blackwell et al. investigated customer loyalty of service products and proposed a value loyalty model. They believed that customer perceived value was a balance between customer perceived gain and perceived loss, and believed that this balance was formed gradually [3]. The definition of perceived value studied by these scholars later became a widely accepted concept among researchers. Herrmann et al. believe that the main factors influencing perceived value are information acquisition ability, experience, learning ability, time and economic factors, such as money [4]. Extending these studies, this paper proposes the following hypotheses:

  • H1: Perceived purposeful value of virtual community members significantly positively affects community trading platform trust.

  • H2: Perceived purposeful value of virtual community members has a significant positive impact on their purchase intention of virtual community trading platform.

McKenna et al. believe that virtual community members have strong social drivers, namely social connection and social reinforcement [5]. In a virtual community, certain social benefits can be obtained through connection and communication with others, such as intimacy among members, elimination of loneliness, meeting people with similar views, establishment of benefits among people and acquisition of certain social support. In addition, community members can gain recognition and attention from others due to their contributions, so that the status of individuals in the virtual community can be improved, so as to receive respect from others and have a certain sense of achievement. Fan ** believes that the network, anonymity, online interaction and borderless nature of virtual communities make communities have special cultural and social characteristics. Virtual community with strong gathering power is essentially because it can bring benefits to community members and meet their different needs. Virtual community is the extension of the real society on the Internet, and in some aspects, it is the supplement and reinforcement of the real society. Virtual community is a place where members and organizers create value together and share value together [6]. Extending these studies, this paper believes that the higher the social value perceived by community members, the more likely it is to influence their trust in and purchase intention of community trading platform. Therefore, it proposes the following hypothesis:

  • H3: Perceived social value of virtual community members significantly positively affects community trading platform trust.

  • H4: Perceived social value of virtual community members significantly affects the purchase intention of community members.

Bauer introduced the psychological concept of perceived risk into the research of marketing earlier. He believed that perceived risk was caused by consumer behavior, which consumers could not predict for sure and was inconsistent with their own wishes [7]. Engel believes that perceived risk is a consumer’s cognition of whether there is a risk before buying a certain commodity or service. Hsin believes that perceived risk is a consumer’s perception of the uncertainty of purchasing goods and services and the opposite result of activity, which is generally used to explain consumers’ purchasing decision behavior [8]. Dowling believes that perceived risk is the uncertainty that consumers perceive when they buy a product or service about the adverse structure that might occur. At the same time, consumers are accustomed to avoid risks, so consumer behavior is closely related to perceived risks [9]. Compared with traditional face-to-face transactions, online transactions have more uncertainties. Therefore, in recent years, more scholars have conducted researches on consumers’ perceived risks in the network environment. Therefore this paper proposes the following hypothesis:

  • H5: Perceived risk of virtual community members significantly negatively affects community trading platform trust.

  • H6: Perceived risk of virtual community members significantly negatively affects the purchase intention of community members.

Lee et al. studied the transfer of offline trust to online trust, pointing out that trust transfer is a cognitive process in which people’s trust in one field affects their trust and attitude towards other fields. He also studied different trust transfer processes, that is, trust transfer within channels and trust transfer between channels. The transfer of trust in a channel means that the trust of a user in a product will affect his trust in another product in the same channel. Trust between channels refers to the transfer process of trust between different channels [10].

  • H7: Community trading platform trust significantly positively affects users’ purchase intention.

To sum up, the research model proposed in this paper is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1.
figure 1

Conceptual model

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3 Research Method

On the basis of a large number of related literature studies, the research scale of this paper is developed by referring to the previous research results and combining with the background of this paper. After the initial scale was designed, three scholars in this field and five users of the virtual community trading platform were invited to put forward their views and opinions, and some adjustments were made based on their Suggestions. Then, the modified scale was pre-tested in a small range, and the scale description was modified according to the results of the pre-test and the questions of the tested objects. All measure terms adopt 7 points Likert method, 1 means strongly disagree, 7 means strongly agree.

This study selected TIEXUE, TIANYA, HAICI and 19LOU as data sources. Since the respondents are users with shop** experience on the community exchange platform, the questionnaire is mainly published in the community forum in the form of rewards, but the questionnaire recovery rate is relatively low. After that, questionnaires were sent out by mutual recommendation of friends in the community, with a high recovery rate. After sorting out the recovered questionnaires, a total of 269 valid questionnaires were obtained. The men surveyed are slightly more than the women, with the age distribution concentrated between 18 and 30, the most active group of Internet users.

4 Data Analysis and Hypothesis Testing

Principal component factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis were used to test the measurement model. Bartlett’s Test of Sphericity showed that the KMO (Kaiser - Meyer-Olkin) value of the sample data was 0.821 and significant at the level of 0.01, indicating that the scale was suitable for principal component analysis. According to the standard that the characteristic value is greater than 1, 7 factors are extracted, the variance interpretation rate is 78.564%, and the load value of each indicator’s corresponding factor is greater than 0.5, while the factor load value of the cross variable is less than 0.5, indicating that each indicator can effectively reflect its corresponding factor and the scale validity can be guaranteed.

This paper uses confirmatory factor analysis to test the reliability and validity of variables. AVE of each variable was greater than 0.6, indicating that the scale had good validity. Cronbach’s alpha of each factor is greater than 0.7, indicating that the scale has good reliability. Composite Reliability (CR) was used to evaluate the internal consistency of the model, and the results showed that the CR value of each variable was higher than 0.7, indicating that the scale had good reliability. Since the standard load of some measures is too low, these indicators, such as PSV3 and PR3, are deleted. The results of confirmatory factor analysis are shown in Table 2.

Table 2. Load measurement standards and average variance extracted
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LISREL is used to test the hypothesis of the model. It shows the results after the hypothesis test. Perceived purposive value and perceived social value significantly affect purchase intention, verifying H2 and H3, but not H1 and H4. Perceived risk significantly negatively affects the trading platform’s trust and purchase intention, while perceived cost significantly negatively affects purchase intention, which verifies H5, H6 and H7.

5 Conclusion

Based on trust transfer theory, information value, this paper constructs a research model to influence the transformation of virtual community users to community transaction users. Based on the data collection and analysis of the users who have successfully transferred from virtual community services to e-commerce, it is found that the trust of virtual community plays an important role in influencing the trust of community members to the community trading platform and the purchase decision process. The results are as follows.

Perceived purposive value and perceived social value significantly positively affect users’ purchase intention, but have no significant impact on the trust of the trading platform. This is consistent with the findings of Dodds et al. The perceived value of users to the virtual community includes purposive value, self-discovery, social reinforcement, maintenance of interpersonal relationship and entertainment value, all of which strengthen users’ perception of the usefulness and quality of the virtual community and thus influence users’ behaviors. Virtual community service providers should, through various channels, such as in-depth rational discussion of people’s life concerns, enhance users’ perceived value of virtual community through rational analysis, so as to potentially guide users’ purchase behavior.

Perceived risk significantly negatively affects purchase intention. In the context of the transformation of virtual community users into community trading platform customers, the traditional risk and cost perception still has a significant negative impact on the purchase intention of customers, but the degree of such impact is relatively small compared with the trust and value perception of virtual community. Virtual community service providers to build e-commerce trading platform, still need to take some traditional marketing methods to promote the success of the trading platform.