Beyond Channel Expansion: Comparative Effects of E-commerce Participation on Production Standardization, Marketing Diversification, and Green Technology Adoption among Grape Growers

Abstract

Using survey data from 386 grape growers in Yingkou City, this article examines whether e-commerce participation affects three distinct domains of growers’ behavioural upgrading: standardized production, diversified marketing, and green technology adoption. Unlike studies that treat behavioural change as a single aggregate outcome, this paper compares the relative sensitivity of each domain and discusses why different behavioural responses emerge under the same digital market condition. A regression framework based on the dissertation dataset shows that e-commerce participation exerts significant positive effects on all three outcomes, with the strongest direct effect observed for diversified marketing behaviour (0.465), followed by standardized production behaviour (0.428) and green technology adoption behaviour (0.412). Mechanism evidence indicates that information acquisition capability works as a positive transmission channel, while risk perception introduces a countervailing restraint effect. The comparison of moderator coefficients further suggests that marketing behaviour is the most elastic behavioural domain: it is more strongly weakened by household-head age and more strongly reinforced by planting scale and household human capital than the other two outcomes. These findings imply that the digital transformation of specialty agriculture should not be evaluated only by whether farmers sell online; rather, it should be assessed in terms of which business functions are upgraded first, which require stronger capability support, and which groups can convert e-commerce participation into stable behavioural change more effectively.