Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

4.3 SAMPLE
 
The population for the study consisted of Chinese online shoppers. Online shoppers refer to 
consumers who have purchased goods or services at certain online store at least once. As the 
study aims to investigate the consumers’ online purchase behaviour from the perspective of 
TCs, without a direct interaction with the online vendor, non-online shoppers would not be 
able to answer the specific questions concerning their online shopping experiences as well as 
the characteristics and performance of the online store’s products and services.
In the online environment, consumers are more likely to switch to another online vendor 
since they are endowed with relative ease of access to information and lower searching costs, 
compared to consumers in the brick-and-mortar, offline context. Developing a long-term 
relationship with customers has been recognized as an important factor in creating 
profitability for online vendors (Ranganathan and Ganapathy 2002). Improving customer 
loyalty is an imperative issue to online vendors. Exploring the formation of customer loyalty 
from the perspective of TCs is one of the purposes of this study. It should be noted that the 
customer here means the online shopper who has experienced at least one instance of online 
shopping from an online vendor. Understanding the online shoppers’ loyalty will provide 
online vendors with direct information regarding formulating marketing strategies and 
leveraging their resources and capabilities to retain existing customers. In light of the above 
two reasons, online shoppers were selected as the sample population.
There were no sex or age range requirements for this study as the aim is for studying the 
online purchase and post-purchase behaviours of general online shoppers. However, online 
shoppers under 18 years old will not be taken into consideration because they are probablly 

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not financially independent and do not represent the mainstream population of consuming 
online goods in China.
To ensure the representativeness of the survey respondents, it is critically important that a 
large number of randomly selected online shoppers are included in the survey. As the sample 
size gets larger, the size of sampling error gets smaller and sample statistics like sample mean, 
sample standard deviation, and so on resemble the population statistics more closely 
(Gravetter and Wallnau 2008). The next section delineated the data collection procedure.