The Consumers' Heuristics effects of E-Commerce's Price Promotion on Perceived Value

Abstract

More and more E-Commerce’s issues are studied in these days, especially for the price promotion. Due to customers have different thinking process; their perceived value is different too. Some researches study the impact of consumer behavior by price promotion type or frequency, yet these researches seldom examine the mental processing before purchase decision making by the promotion factors. Mental simulation can be used as a heuristic for estimating probabilities or assessing causality. Therefore, based on the perspective of consumers’ heuristics, this paper fills that gap by focusing on the impact of E-Commerce's Price Promotion on Perceived Value. With quasi-experimental design, the study used the repeated measures and covariates to examine the combined interactive effects of mental simulation and discount rate on perceived value. Results show that when faced with promotion situations may invoke the consumers through the process of mental simulation to interpretation of discount and found that the heuristics will interfere with the mental simulation on effect of perceived value. Furthermore under high discount rate and percent-off discount, the consumers will have the highest level of perception value, but not for the lowest level at low discount rate and price-off situation.