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Top1. Introduction
With the rapid development and popularization of Internet technology, China's Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) e-commerce market has risen rapidly and has become one of the main ways for consumers to exchange goods and services (Saylam and Yıldız, 2022). According to the China e-Business Research Center, the C2C e-commerce market has maintained a rapid growth momentum in the past few years and is expected to maintain strong growth in the future. This trend has not only changed the landscape of traditional retail but also provided consumers with a more convenient and diversified shopping experience.
However, despite the booming C2C e-commerce market, consumers still face a range of risks and challenges when making online transactions. The issue of trust is one of the most important factors for consumers in C2C e-commerce (Leonard and Jones, 2021). Unlike traditional face-to-face transactions, buyers and sellers on C2C e-commerce platforms often have no physical contact and are difficult to directly establish a trusting relationship. Consumers' concerns about counterfeit goods, false publicity, payment risks, and transaction disputes may discourage their willingness to purchase (Leung et al., 2020).
In addition, perceived benefits are an important factor influencing consumers' purchase intention on C2C e-commerce platforms. The more consumers perceive the benefits of a transaction, including those in terms of price concessions, product quality, after-sales service, and shopping experience, the more likely they are to choose to make a purchase on a C2C e-commerce platform. Therefore, understanding consumers' expectations and evaluations of perceived benefits and the impact of these factors on purchase intention is important to improve consumers' purchasing decisions and facilitate transaction completion.
In this context, this work aims to explore the relationship among trust, perceived benefit, and purchase intention in C2C e-commerce in China and verify these relationships through empirical testing. Through the in-depth study of these key factors, the characteristics of C2C e-commerce transactions and the laws of consumer behavior can be revealed, and useful enlightenment and decision-making support can be provided for e-commerce platform operators and decision-makers. Based on previous research, this work proposes a series of hypotheses and designs corresponding questionnaires to collect empirical data. The innovation of this work is to explore the relationship among trust, perceived benefit, and purchase intention in C2C e-commerce from a multi-dimensional perspective. First, the relationship between sample structure and variables is analyzed and verified by statistical methods, such as reliability, validity, correlation, and regression analysis. Meanwhile, correlation coefficients and regression analysis are used to explore the significant relationship and mutual influence among trust, perceived benefit, and purchase intention. Second, the perceived benefits of consumers to C2C e-commerce exchanges are studied. Finally, the performance and influencing factors of consumers' purchase intention in the C2C e-commerce environment are studied. Consumer behavior and decision-making drivers are better understood to provide new insights into research and practice in e-commerce by deeply analyzing the interplay of these key factors.