An Empirical Study on the Effect of Consumer Confusion on Online Conformity Consumption in E-commerce

In e-commerce, consumers often become confused when faced with massive, similar, and vague information, resulting in shopping delays, giving up, or following the crowd for consumption. What is the impact mechanism of online consumer confusion on their conformity consumption? Conducting in-depth research on it undoubtedly has important theoretical significance and practical value. On the basis of reviewing relevant literature on consumer confusion, cognitive dissonance, and conformity consumption, this study constructs a research model and proposes research hypotheses. Then, data was collected through a questionnaire survey and analyzed for reliability and validity using SPSS software. Model validation and hypothesis testing were conducted using LISREL structural equation modeling software. The research results indicate that consumer overload confusion has a significant positive impact on their cognitive dissonance, which in turn leads to their conformist consumption behavior. However, the impact of consumers' similarity confusion and ambiguity confusion on their cognitive dissonance is not significant. Interestingly, further analysis of moderating effects found that, compared to males, the impact of female consumers’ similarity confusion and ambiguity confusion on cognitive dissonance is relatively weak. This significant gender difference partially explains the insignificant impact of similarity confusion and ambiguity confusion on cognitive dissonance mentioned above. These research results contain rich theoretical and practical implications.