The Analysis of farmers’ changing purchase channel behaviors of agricultural inputs under the social innovation system: A case study of Jiangsu Province

Under the background of the integration of Internet technology and traditional agriculture, agricultural online input sales becomes very popular. Understanding farmers’ willingness, choice and evaluation of online purchase of agricultural inputs, and analyzing the influencing factors are important parts of releasing the “digital dividend” of rural e-commerce. Based on a micro-survey data of Lianyungang City, Nanjing City and Suzhou City of Jiangsu Province and applying the analysis paradigm of Nicosia model and the social innovation theory, this paper analyzed the behaviors of farmers’ purchase channel changes and explored the influencing factors of online purchase behaviors by the binary logistic regression model. Results show that: the changing behaviors of farmers purchasing agricultural inputs online mainly include three stages: “motivation-behavior-evaluation”. Data analysis shows that 68.53% of farmers know that they can purchase agricultural inputs online and 167 farmers proceeded from the purchasing motives to actual purchasing behaviors. Third-party platforms and professional agricultural purchasing stations are the main channels for online purchases. In terms of purchase evaluation, input quality, brand reputation, and price are the most important aspects for farmers to purchase agricultural inputs online. This research also finds that the farmers’ education level, merchant delivery services, and offline technical support have hindered the transformation from the online purchase motivation of farmers to online purchase behaviors. While 7 other variables, including gender being male, household income, brand reputation, social network influence, infrastructure construction, policy propaganda, and price-sensitive synergy, have positive influences. Therefore, this paper suggests to increase the depth of rural e-commerce policy promotion, to pay attention to the impacts of social network influence on farmers’ behavior choices, and to enhance the online consumption experience of farmers.