Abstract: Farmers are faced with multiple purchasing channels when buying agricultural inputs. Information and social network are important factors that affect the choice of purchasing channels. Based on a rural household survey data in Shaanxi, Gansu, Shandong, and Yunnan, this paper compared firm direct sales and store retails of agricultural inputs and analyzed the impacts of information and social network on farmers’ purchasing channel choices by the binary Logit model and the mediation effect model. Survey data shows that 89.9% of farmers choose store retails to purchase agricultural inputs while only 10.1% of surveyed farmers choose firm direct sales. Estimation results show that information utilization and the social network of relatives and friends have significant positive impacts on farmers’ choice of firm direct sales, but the social network of friendship has no significant impacts. While farmers’ cognition of agricultural market information has partial mediating effect on the impact of information utilization on farmers’ choice of direct sales. Therefore, to help farmers improve their purchasing decisions, the government should strengthen the construction of rural information infrastructure, cultivate the ability of farmers to use information, promote the effective diffusion of information with social network by expanding the propaganda objects of public information supply and constructing an effective information exchange platform between agricultural inputs enterprises and farmers.