Investigating EWOM, perceived risk and perceived usefulness towards online purchase intention in Malaysia : the mediating effects of perceived trust

Abstract

The main objective of this research is to investigate the effects of electronic word-of-mouth, perceived risk, and perceived usefulness towards online purchase intention of customers in Malaysia. The aggressive promotional activities in social media platforms by the product marketers put the customers in a dilemma and triggered the need for perceived trust to be investigated while purchasing goods and services online. Hence, this research also studied the role of perceived trust towards online purchase intension and to what extent it mediates the relationships among the predictors and customers’ online purchase intention. A quantitative research design has been adopted to conduct this study by investigating 428 valid responses collected from survey. The respondents were selected conveniently from Malaysia who visit online shopping platforms like Lazada, Shopee, Amazon and 11 Street. IBM SPSS (version 25) and SmartPLS (version 4) statistical programs have been used to analyze the data and validate the models. This study finds that electronic word-of-mouth is the most significant predictor for customers’ online purchase intension, whereas perceived risk is the least significant one. Perceived usefulness is found to be not significant. Additionally, the findings also show that perceived trust is a strong predictor for customers’ online purchase intension and partially mediates the relationships among electronic word-of-mouth and perceived risk with customers’ online purchase intention. The outcome from this research has contributed to new theoretical insights. The study concludes that online product marketers need to strategy their promotions by enabling favorable electronic word-of-mouth from contented customers via social media channels and dedicated customer review sections through their platforms. Marketers should reinforce customers’ trust issues, prioritizing their favorable online shopping experiences and minimizing risk factors while marketing goods and services online. A detailed guideline as recommendation has been developed for online product marketers as the practical contribution of this study.