Online Shopping Environment

Online Shopping Environments

ABSTRACT

This paper explores search behavior of online shoppers. Information economics literature suggests that search cost in electronic markets has essentially been reduced to zero as consumers are able to use powerful search tools, free of charge, to easily find and compare product and shopping information on the Internet. In the present research, however, we present a research model proposing that users need to spend time and effort when completing search tasks, resulting in significant search cost and a trade-off between search cost and search performance. Preliminary findings from an Internet experiment indicate that search task complexity, search engine capability, search strategy, and user experience are important factors determining search cost and performance.

Online Shopping Environments

INTRODUCTION

Since the explosion of the World Wide Web in the 1990's, the Internet has become an increasingly important information source for consumers. A shopper may use Web search tools ro look up pre-purchase producr information (prices, design, style, reviews, etc.), even if the transaction is finally executed offline. Competing with Web directories, catalogs and online databases, search engines have quickly become the primary Web search tool, though they did not come into public existence until 1994 (Chu and Rosenthal, 1996). Since search cost is an important factor affecting consumers' purchase decisions as well as the seller's pricing (Stahl, 1989; Stahl, 1996), consumers usually tend to develop some search strategies to better manage the search process and to reduce search cost. Online consumer search strategies include the choice and usage of search engines, query formulation tactics, stopping and filtering rules, and other heuristics aimed at coping with the vast amount of information that search engines typically return.

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. The next section reviews the literatures on search cost theory and search behavior. The following section develops a research model for studying the determining factors of Web search performance in an online shopping context and also proposes four central research hypotheses. We then describe the research methodology and present some preliminary findings. We conclude with a discussion of the potential implications of our research and an outline of future research directions.

RESEARCH MODEL

Based on the previous literature, we include user ability, search task, and search engine capabilities as the independent variables in our own research model and use search performance, which is modeled as a combination of search cost and user satisfaction, as the dependent variable (Figure 2). Users' employed search heuristic is a moderating variable that affects the intensity of the relationships among the main variables.

User Ability

User ability refers to the users' experience in using search engines and to their knowledge of the subject of the search. User experience (Hoischer and Strube, 2000; Hsieh-Yee, 1993; Yuan, 1997) and subject knowledge (Hoischer and Strube, 2000; Yuan, 1997) have been found to significantly affect consumer information search. User experience can be more specifically measured by user's Web experience and search experience (Hoischer and Strube, 2000; Hsieh-Yee, 1993; Yuan, 1997). Web experience is the length of time a user has been ...