Hong Kong Baptist University

Bid or Buy It Now

�With $40 billion in annual gross merchandise volume, electronic auctions comprise a substantial and growing sector of the retail economy in US� (Marketing Science). Nowadays, electronic auction is becoming more and more popular, as the security, payment and monitoring system are more well developed. The traditional shopping behavior have been changed progressively in the world. As the electronic auction is playing an important role in the economy, it is necessary for business to understand people�s shopping trait in electronic auction. It is because the shopping trait is greatly different from the traditional mode, understanding the online consuming behavior would be one of the key of success for both business and individuals. As we know, electronic auction is similar to traditional auction that we have to compete with others by bidding, but it is a bit different that electronic auction allow the consumer to use Buy It Now(BIN) function to end up the auction pre-maturely by paid the seller assigned BIN price. There are some interesting phenomena that sometime consumer will keen on compete the bid with others, but sometime they will use BIN function to end up the auction even the bidding time is still remained a lot.
In this paper, we will study Ebay Honh Kong and investigate about the factors affecting the consumer to BID or BIN from analyzing their gender, impulse buying behavior, product knowledge, trait competitive and auction time remaining.