Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

 et al.
1996, Bolton 1998, Bolton and 
Lemon 1999, Hennig-Thurau
 et al.
2002) as they do not need to spend the same amount of 
time checking the performance of the online store.

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Liang and Huang (1998) explicates that the reaction of inexperienced and experienced online 
consumers to the same level of uncertainty in the transaction process is different because 
there is a difference in their tolerance of uncertainty. Generally speaking, to consumers who 
have online buying experience, their perceived uncertainties are reduced sharply because of 
their experience with buying online, whereas consumers without online buying experience 
would perceive much more uncertainties in online shopping, and are less likely to buy 
products online (Yen
 et al.
2013). As Furnell et al. (2008) claim, novice consumers worry 
about credit card theft more than experienced consumers. Experienced Internet users believe 
that online shopping is more trustworthy than inexperience users (George 2002) and 
consequently their perceived TCs of online shopping is lower than inexperience users (Yen
 et 
al.
2013). The above arguments lead to the following hypothesis:
H1c: A customer’s online buying frequency is negatively related to his/her perceived TCs 
associated with online shopping. 
3.6.1.2 Online Store- and Product-Related Characteristics 
Online store- and product-related characteristics refer to the key attributes and features of the 
online store and its products, which may affect a customer’s perception of online TCs. 
Antecedents falling into this category, encompass product quality concern, site design, e-
service quality, and reputation of the online store. 
Product quality concern 
Product quality concern refers to the difficulties in ascertaining the quality of products (Teo
 
et al.
2004). It reflects the uncertainty of online shopping. Prior to or upon ordering, 
consumers are likely to wonder if the purchased products will meet their expectation after 

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purchasing. The product quality uncertainty is one of the consumers’ major concerns (Wu
 et 
al.
2013), because most consumers worry about product quality without being able to 
physically check products prior to purchase (Yen
 et al.
2013).
Dholakia et al. (2010) highlight that consumers value physicality as it helps them understand 
product quality more easily. When consumers shop physically, they can examine a product 
and then decide whether they will take it home, while in online shopping, consumers face the 
difficulties in examining the quality of products due to the lack of physicality, thus they are 
more concerned about the product quality (Teo and Yu 2005). Consumers rely on the quality 
examination that online stores conduct for them. This characteristic of online shopping 
significantly increases the uncertainty of inspecting products. In this situation, consumers 
might put themselves at risk.
To ascertain the quality of products which they intend to buy, consumer would spend 
additional time and efforts evaluating their quality and communicating with online vendors 
about the product quality, which would result in an increase in their evaluation cost. If the 
quality of products cannot meet their expectation after a series of inspection processes, 
consumer would bear some psychological costs, such as frustration, anxiety and 
dissatisfaction, which subsequently raise their perceived TCs. However, if consumers do like 
certain features of the products, such as the design, style, colour and the like, they may have 
to invest more time and effort in searching for suitable alternatives and examining their 
quality again, in this case, they would sense high search cost and evaluation cost, leading to a 
rise in their perceived overall TCs.

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Most internet users are dissuaded by concerns about product quality in online shopping due to 
a lack of physical check (Teo