Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

6.4 LIMITATIONS 
Although the findings have been encouraging and useful, the research is not without 
limitations which will be discussed in this section. 

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This study possesses five main limitations. Firstly, because this study is cross-sectional in 
nature, the findings may be biased by spurious cause/effect inferences. Within the relatively 
short period of time in which the study was administered, it would be difficult to infer 
causality relations between variables. Therefore, it would be more appropriate to build the 
hypothesized sequence of the effects over a longer period of time.
Secondly, this study identifies three types of TCs (pre-, contemporaneous-, post-TCs), but it 
does not explain how and which of these three types of costs would be instrumental in 
determining consumers’ online purchase and loyalty. Although it has been verified in the 
study that an increase in overall TCs of online shopping would inhibit the occurrence of 
purchasing behaviour and the development of customer loyalty, the void of results to 
articulate which type of TCs affects purchase behaviour and post-purchase behaviour calls for 
more research on this point.
 
Thirdly, due to the lack of strong theoretical support or grounding from extant literature, the 
moderating effect of consumers’ risk-bearing propensity on the relationship between TCs and 
online purchase behaviour and the moderating effect of perceived enjoyment on the 
relationship between TCs and customer loyalty have not been addressed as this would 
initially have seemed more like speculation on account of the presence of these moderators in 
the conceptual model. However, upon empirically gaining evidence of the strong effects of 
these moderators on consumers’ preference of shopping medium, it may warrant the need for 
future research to observe the moderating influence and propose some theoretical structuring 
for this suggested moderating effect.

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Fourthly, although the proposed model is tested across two product categories, whether the 
findings are generalizable to all products and services on the web is unclear. Further research 
is necessary to verify their generalizability. This study required online shoppers to focus on 
their most recent online shopping experience with an online store, but overlooked the 
possibility that consumers’ purchase behaviour and post-purchase behaviour could vary in the 
forms of the shopping websites and the characteristics of online vendor. Previous research 
(Hahn and Kim 2009) has indicated that multi-channel retailers who operate online stores and 
also own brick-and-mortar stores have received more trust from consumers and adopt 
different strategies to carry out online businesses. Accordingly, consumer behaviour towards 
this type of retailers might differ from those who do not have physical stores (i.e., pure online 
players).
Finally, as the sample was collected in China, generalizability to other cultures may be 
limited as China may have very different social and cultural beliefs (Hofstede
 et al.
2010), 
government regulations, business norms and the likes from other developing or developed 
economies. However, as TCT at the firm level has been shown to be valid in many domains 
and cultures, this limitation is not seen as problematic.