Abstract
Online store environments have changed due to advancements in broadband speed and web development technologies. Despite the widespread real-time interactive features in online stores, social cues have been overlooked in a great number of taxonomies of online store atmospheric cues. To fill the gap, this study considers social cues with other atmospheric cues (i.e., visual, information, and navigation) in the taxonomy, and examines critical atmospheric cues that can generate a pleasure emotional response. The study also investigates whether the pleasure emotional response can lead to the approach behavior of consumers. Amazon.com, the U.S. top online pure player, is used as the specific research setting, and the results demonstrate that all atmospheric cues except visual cues can generate the pleasure emotional response. The pleasure emotional response turned out to be a significant predictor of the approach behavior.
Highlights
U.S online retailers have achieved significant growth since the early 1990s, the growth rate of the U.S online market has declined in recent years
Researchers have demonstrated the significance of a variety of online store atmospheric cues in creating positive online shopping experiences and provided guidelines for better designing online store environments to online business practitioners (Chang & Chen, 2008; Ha & Lennon, 2010; Koo & Ju, 2010)
The major gaps in previous research on online store atmospheric cues are inconsistency and the absence of considering social cues in taxonomies of online store atmospheric cues
Summary
U.S online retailers have achieved significant growth since the early 1990s, the growth rate of the U.S online market has declined in recent years. The saturated online market has brought a significant problem especially to online retailers because of easy consumer mobility of online stores. The importance of store environment has been recognized by scholars for a long time, and a number of studies have demonstrated the importance of store environment regardless of store channels (i.e., brick-and-mortar stores or online stores) (Dailey, 2004; Eroglu, Machleit, & Davis, 2003; Manganari et al, 2009). The studies of atmospherics emphasized the importance of positive emotional responses generated from atmospheric cues in a store, which in turn increase shoppers’ revisit intentions (Dailey, 2004; Eroglu et al, 2003; Manganari et al, 2009)
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