An Empirical Study on the Types of C2C Sellers´ Perceived Risk in the Entire Transaction Process

The perceived risk of sellers has been rarely considered in the past research. In order to clarify the types of sellers´ perceived risk and match them with the transaction stages, this paper analyzed a number of posts on e-bay(answer center)forum by employing the method of Netnograhy. The conclusions are as follows:(1)There are five types of C2C sellers´ perceived risk, including economic risk, evaluation risk, time risk, eligibility risk and image risk, of which the first three are the core types. (2)The types of C2C sellers´ perceived risk exist in each transaction stage. The salient periods are the second stage-items for sale, the fourth stage -settlement-collection, the sixth stage-returning-evaluation and the eighth stage-the phase indirectly related to the deals. These conclusions provide theoretical support for the C2C platform operators to develop relevant policies to reduce the sellers´ perceived risk.