124
dissipate as consumers learn that cookies typically cannot access data other than that already
provided to the website by the consumer. Therefore, this study argues that consumers with
higher levels of Internet expertise would have more knowledge and control of online risks
and
uncertainties, thus their perceived TCs towards evaluating the risks and uncertainties
would be lower. Evaluating uncertainties requires information or knowledge about the
Internet environment and online vendors, in this sense consumers’ Internet expertise plays an
important role in estimating the online uncertainties (Kunreuther 2002, Yen
et al.
2013). This
claim is also supported by the view that online uncertainties diminish with increased Internet
expertise (Forsythe
et al.
2006). All of the above leads to the following hypothesis:
H1b: A customer’s perceived Internet expertise is negatively related to his/her perceived TCs
associated with online shopping.
Online buying frequency
Transaction frequency refers to the extent to which transactions recur (Yen
et al.
2013).
Williamson (1981a) suggests transaction frequency is one of the critical dimensions for
describing transactions. Higher transaction frequencies provide companies with a motive to
employ hierarchical governance structures, as these structures make it easier to recover large
transactions of a recurring kind (Williamson 1985, Teo
et al.
2004).
Many researchers have
failed to confirm empirically that transaction frequency is related to a choice of governance
structure (Rindfleisch and Heide 1997, Anderson 2008). While some studies investigating the
factors that affect online shopping behaviour chose to omit this construct from their research
models (Liang and Huang 1998, Teo
et al.
2004), when transactions are supposed to occur at
a high frequency, both transaction parties are likely to desire
a specific or convenient
platform to deal with the repeated transactions. Thus, this study continues to explore the
relationship between transaction frequency and online shopping behaviour.
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Online buying frequency is here defined as the extent to which an online shopper perceives
that he or she frequently conducts online buying from a certain online store. The study
considers online buying frequency as an important antecedent of consumer TCs since it
represents the dimension of frequency in the original TCT. According to TCT (Williamson
1981a, Williamson 1985, Williamson and Ghani 2012), a high level of transaction frequency
reduces perceived TCs associated with the shopping channel.
The results of the empirical studies built on TCT in the context of
online shopping show that
consumers with high buying frequency sense less TCs than those with low buying frequency
(Teo and Yu 2005, Kim and Li 2009b, Yen
et al.
2013). This may be because consumers get
used to the process once they have experience buying online. They are more likely to
understand the risks and uncertainties of online shopping. The learning process may reduce
their perceived TCs associated with online shopping (Wu
et al.
2014). Teo (2006) states that
consumers may not be familiar with online purchase in their first time of online shopping. For
instance, they would not know how to open an online bank account
or how to pay for the
products by using the online payment system, etc., which increases the perceived learning
cost of online purchase. When consumers are more familiar with the process after several
times of successful online transactions, they will have a better understanding of the entire
process
of online shopping, hence their perceived TCs, such as search cost, evaluation cost,
etc. would decrease. Furthermore, if consumers are satisfied with the products purchased at
an
online store, they will be very likely to continue to buy from the online store (Cronin and
Taylor 1992, Anderson and Sullivan 1993, Zeithaml
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