The Asymmetric Role of Perceived Quality and Perceived Risk in Consumers’ Try-Before-You-Buy Model Acceptance Intention

Abstract Encouraging consumers to adopt a new shopping model is always challenging for a retailer. With the fierce competition in the retail industry, retailers aim to actively reach more consumers, especially on the internet. The Try-Before-You-Buy (TBYB) e-commerce shopping model has been emerging and rapidly developing recently. This study examines the antecedents of consumers’ acceptance of the TBYB model. We find that tailoring to consumers’ preferences—namely, implementing a customization strategy—is beneficial to enhance consumers’ perceived quality of the TBYB model, however, it also increases their perceived risk of the model. Additionally, offering a flexible forward transaction process is more important than the backward transaction flexibility because while both increase consumers’ perceived quality, only the forward transaction flexibility reduces consumers’ perceived risk of the TBYB model. Further, we find while the perceived quality is a facilitator for consumers to have the intention to accept the TBYB model, higher perceived risk is not a preventer. This reveals the asymmetric role of consumers’ perceived quality and perceived risk in generating their TBYB model acceptance intention. Our study helps retailers to implement the corresponding improvement policies and designs to better optimize the operations of the TBYB model.