Exploring purchase intention in cross-border E-commerce: A three stage model

Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has been thriving in recent years, generating economic benefits for sellers and consumers. To keep up with this trend, sellers need to improve product cognition in order to improve consumers’ interest and behavior. Little research has focused on the influence of product cognition on purchase intention in CBEC. This study employs the hierarchy-of-effects model and the commitment-involvement theory to develop a three-stage model to evaluate the impact of product cognition on purchase intention in CBEC. Data was collected on a popular Chinese CBEC platform. The analysis shows that product description and product awareness have a positive effect on trust beliefs, and both platform enduring involvement and platform situational involvement positively affect trust. Purchase intention is subject to the positive impact of platform situational involvement and trust beliefs in addition to platform enduring involvement. Finally, perceived trust plays a full mediation effect in the three-stage model, which indicates that, on CBEC platforms, consumers’ processing and response is a sequence from product cognition to platform emotion and from platform emotion to behavior intention. The theoretical contribution of this study is a three-stage model involving two types of platform involvement in CBEC settings. Such model allows CBEC platform providers to increase consumers’ purchase intentions by improving product description, product awareness and platform involvement.