Abstract
The online shopping market is developing rapidly, meaning that it is important for retailers and manufacturers to understand how consumers behave online compared to when in brick-and-mortar stores. Retailers want consumers to spend time shopping, browsing, and searching for products in the hope a purchase is made. On the other hand, consumers may want to restrict their duration of stay on websites due to perceived risk of loss of time or convenience. This phenomenon underlies the need to reduce the duration of consumer stay (namely, time pressure) on websites. In this paper, the browsing behavior and attention span of shoppers engaging in online shopping under time pressure were investigated. The attention and meditation level are measured by an electroencephalogram (EEG) biosensor cap. The results indicated that when under time pressure shoppers engaging in online shopping are less attentive. Thus, marketers may need to find strategies to increase a shopper’s attention. Shoppers unfamiliar with product catalogs on shopping websites are less attentive, therefore marketers should adopt an interesting style for product catalogs to hold a shopper’s attention. We discuss our findings and outline their business implications.
Highlights
E-commerce, which has grown exponentially because of Internet technology, has induced changes at the market, industry, and economic levels, and has profoundly altered life, politics, and society [1].Online network platforms are used globally to undertake various online services, and such platforms provide a robust means for generating income and, for an immeasurable number of consumers from around the world, to shop online [2]
Some studies have suggested that time pressure typically prompts decision makers to make decisions and execute decision-making strategies through simple means [25,26], and that people under time constraints can turn to other strategies to facilitate their information processing [27]
Distinctiveness exerts stronger effects on product purchase decisions when consumers are under time pressure [50]. Contrary to these previous studies, this study found that subjects did not pay more attention to renowned brand products when they were under time pressure
Summary
E-commerce, which has grown exponentially because of Internet technology, has induced changes at the market, industry, and economic levels, and has profoundly altered life, politics, and society [1].Online network platforms are used globally to undertake various online services, and such platforms provide a robust means for generating income and, for an immeasurable number of consumers from around the world, to shop online [2]. Shopping websites display numerous products organized by category; despite being produced by different firms, and many of these products share similar features. These products, along with their information, are too great in number to be processed by the human brain because of a human’s limited cognitive capacity, causing the consumer confusion and low satisfaction [3,4,5]. Shopping is a series of decision-making processes aimed at satisfying consumer needs. Time pressure is an influential factor in consumer behavior [21]; it can have a marked influence on decision-making and restrict information-processing ability [22]. Pieters and Warlop [18] argued that consumers under time pressure will filter some information, accelerate information acquisition, and adjust their information acquisition strategies
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