Personality traits and effectiveness of presentation of product information in e-business systems

Abstract

Consumer interaction with product information is one of the critical components in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce environments. Online consumers' characteristics can be expected to play an important role when designing how product information is presented in such e-commerce environments. We suggest that online consumers' personality traits impact effectiveness of the presentation of product information on e-commerce sites and the extent to which the various e-commerce environments are effective. In this article, we propose and empirically validate relationships among online consumers' personality traits, product information presentation richness and on-line consumer behaviour in e-commerce environments. Results show that effectiveness of product information presentation varies by online consumers' psychological types, and that rich product information presentation significantly influences the online buying behaviour of intuitive types, and feeling types, rather than sensing and thinking types. Discussion of the results and their implications for theory and practice as well as limitations and future research directions are presented.