E-commerce has become an irreplaceable sales channel for businesses of any size all around the globe. It is a major source of revenue and sales through this channel continue to gain momentum with an annual growth rate of 20%3). The ubiquity, flexibility, and convenience associated with e-commerce has undoubtedly changed the consumption patterns. However, consumers’ preferences and considerations when making purchasing decisions are not static either. In a global competition, businesses have to adopt quickly to respond emerging trends in retail. An important and persistent trend in this regard is ethical consumption, a development which has been widely researched in an offline context. The present experiment demonstrated that online shop-related ethical labeling positively influences consumers’ willingness to pay and purchase intention across a broad range of products. While any type of ethical labeling showed a positive effect in these regards as compared to no ethical labeling, there was no pronounced difference between the various types of labels used. Accordingly, we assume that consumers make inferences from a specific ethical label about the higher–level ethical “trait”.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the amount of willingness to pay for environment-friendly agricultural processed foods by the level of consumption intention. To accomplish the objective of the study a consumer survey was conducted for quantitative analysis regarding consumption pattern. The ordered-probit selection model, Heckman-type two-stage method was employed for an empirical analysis on determining the amount of willingness to pay. The estimation results showed that in the case of consumers who are to keep their consumption at the present level, those with high quality contentment compared to price, brand contentment, and purchasing chiefly in the special store, have the higher amount of willingness. The estimation results also showed that in the case of consumers who are to increase their consumption, those with high quality contentment compared to price, brand contentment, certificate contentment, and having family members who suffer from diseases such as atopy, cancer, diabetes, high blood pressure, have the higher amount of willingness. Therefore For those who are to increase their consumption, enhancement of quality, enhancement of contentment with certificate, promotion are useful to increase the amount of willingness to pay.