Exploring the Effects of Third-party Logins on Consumer’s Online Shopping Behavior

This study examined the influences of security mechanisms, privacy concerns, and information richness on user trust, risk perception and word of mouth; furthermore, it probed into whether users' intention to choose a third-party login is also influenced by the former three factors. The purpose of this study focuses on two major issues: whether the concern of privacy risk affects consumers' online shopping behavior, and whether the privacy risk brought by a shared account would influence users to log in with their social network account to do online shopping. Two hundred and thirty-four valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed to verify research hypotheses. SPSS 17.0 and SmartPLS 3.0 were employed to analyze the data. The research result indicated that risk perception was the most crucial factor determining consumers' third-party login behavior and a user's risk perception could be lowered if a website provides better security mechanisms for privacy protection. The individuals' cognitive needs play a role in adjusting privacy concerns and risk perception. As Internet enterprises provide better privacy policy and higher autonomy and controllability for users to maintain their privacy settings, user trust in their websites will effectively increase and further influence users' use of third-party logins.