Research on product quality control in Chinese online shopping: based on the uncertainty mitigating factors of product quality

Abstract

Compared with the traditional physical market, the problems of information asymmetry and quality uncertainty are more serious in online shopping markets, especially for the fast-developing Chinese online shopping market. In recent years, the interested parties including the online shopping platform, the government regulatory agency and the seller have strengthened product quality control. But in the academic field, there is still a gap in systematic research in this field. Based on the research gap, this article constructs the model of three-level product quality control in Chinese online shopping, then builds an index system of the product quality control ability of the online shopping platform in four dimensions: trust, website informativeness, product diagnosticity and social presence, and finally evaluates the quality control ability of Taobao. Some conclusions are reached. Firstly, the product quality control of Chinese online shopping operates by the three-level control system including the government regulatory agency, the online shopping platform and the seller. Secondly, trust is the most important index to evaluate the product quality control ability of the online shopping platform. Thirdly, after a few years' rectification, the product quality control ability of Taobao is good currently.

Keywords:

• online shopping
• e-shopping
• product quality control
• quality management system
• AHP
• importance-performance analysis
• quadrified graph model

Acknowledgements

This paper is financed by the Research Projects of the Social Science and Humanity on Schemed Fund of the Ministry of Education: The Research of Product Quality Supervision in Online Shopping (No. 11YJA630143).

Notes

1 Online shopping can be divided into platform online shopping and independent-sale online shopping. In platform online shopping, a third party build an online platform for buyers and sellers to exchange information and complete the transfer of cash flow and logistics, websites like eBay and Taobao belong to this type. Independent sale online shopping is one in which home sellers directly sell goods to consumers through network platform, websites such as Amazon, Dangdang, Jingdong Mall belong to this type originally, but later expanded into a mixture of the two models. This article takes platform online shopping as the main object of study.