Value Contribution of Rural E-commerce Development: Model Constructing and Empirical Testing

Abstract

In the field of rural e-commerce, based on literature review, the paper constructs a four-dimensional value contribution model of rural e-commerce to economic, social, cultural, and ecological development. The value contribution scale for rural e-commerce development is designed to collect experts’ opinions, then the measurement items are modified, and a questionnaire survey is conducted with farmers participating in rural e-commerce activities as the respondents. With AMOS software, a first-order structural equation model and a higher-order structural equation model are used to analyse the confirmatory factors of the rural e-commerce value contribution model, and to test the convergence and discriminative validity of the model and other important attributes. It can be concluded from the test results that the four value dimensions of the model show relatively high reliability and validity, which also suggest that the use of this model is highly rational in identifying the value contribution of the development of rural e-commerce, and has successfully developed the value contribution system of rural e-commerce as a formal theory. At the same time, according to the factor loading and the contribution rate of each principal component measured at the overall level, the weight of the principal components and indices of the overall dimension are achieved. Among the four value contribution dimensions, economic value shares the largest contribution brought by rural e-commerce development and ecological value shares the smallest. Therefore, these results and weights gained from this research will be used to determine the priority of the value contribution of rural e-commerce development, and will be taken into consideration in developing rural e-commerce.