Exploring continued use of mobile shopping channel in China: the effects of active coping and its antecedents

Online B2C retailers in China rely heavily on exclusive promotions for mobile shopping to attract new consumers and to promote their mobile shopping channels. However, it is unknown what factors may drive new consumers to continuously do mobile shopping without further promotional incentives. Motivated by the theoretical gap and practical salience of this question, in this study we propose a research model based on coping theory that highlights the critical role of active coping in handling mobile shopping procedures, and further identifies important dispositional traits of consumers and situation-specific factors that are either beneficial or harmful to their coping efforts. We recruited participants for a real mobile shopping task and collected pre-task and post-task survey data to test the research hypotheses. The results reveal important factors that are influential to consumers’ continued use of mobile shopping through a coping mechanism, which contributes to deepening the understanding of user behavior in mobile shopping both from an academic perspective and in practice.