RESEARCH IN PROGRESS: THE SNOB AND BANDWAGON EFFECTS ON CONSUMERS’ PURCHASE INTENTION UNDER DIFFERENT PROMOTION STRATEGIES

The snob and bandwagon effects on online purchase intention has been studied for years. However, little research has focused on their interaction effects under different promotion strategies. This study proposes a model with eye-tracking data to explore consumers’ interests in different promotions. The ultimate purpose of this paper is to investigate the way consumers view information and make purchase decisions on online promotion websites. Drawing on the theory of consumers\u27 behaviour and research on the snob and bandwagon effects, it’s hypothesized that the number of previous purchase will influence consumers\u27 purchase intention through snob and bandwagon effects. Moreover, there will be a negative effect of previous purchase numbers on consumers’ purchase intention for high involved products, and a positive one for low involved products. It’s also assumed that the effect of different promotion strategies (coupons, price discount, cash return) on consumers\u27 price perception can be moderated by the previous purchase number claim

The Impact of Scarcity Messages on the Online Sales of Physical Information Goods

For physical consumer goods with no considerable information component, past research has identified scarcity, due to market conditions or as a producer strategy, as a driver of intention to purchase and willingness to pay. In contrast, information as the major value-creating component of physical information goods is inherently non-scarce. While anecdotal evidence suggests that intended or unintended scarcity can benefit sales of physical information goods, the underlying mechanisms have not been systematically investigated so far. To close this gap, this research develops a model based on an extensive literature review. The model is tested against evidence from e-commerce sales data of 34,748 information goods. We find that quantity-based scarcity overall decreases sales, but is associated with an increase in the quantity purchased among all purchasing customers. We discuss implications for theory development around the scarcification of information

Cognitive and affective scarcities and relational abundance: lessons from the confluence of extreme and chronic scarcities in subsistence marketplaces

Research on subsistence marketplaces provides a number of insights about extreme and chronic resource scarcity as well as intangible scarcities in cognitive and affective realms. These insights have been developed from a variety of sources—quantitative and qualitative research, as well as education for communities and for students through a symbiotic academic-social enterprise. These insights are juxtaposed with extant work on scarcity in consumer research, to derive implications for future research and stimulate thinking on a broad variety of scarcities. Our holistic deep dive into extreme scarcity and its multiple dimensions from the perspective of consumer behavior has much to offer in stimulating future research on scarcity

Valence or Volume? Maximizing Online Review Influence Across Consumers, Products, and Marketing

Evidence shows that products with online reviews have a higher chance to stay in the consideration set of consumers than products with no online reviews do. Online reviews, as consumer-generated content, affect consumers’ purchase decision-making process. Most of the studies in this area have looked at valence and volume of online reviews. Generally, valence and volume of online reviews are considered to positively influence sales; however, the findings in the literature are inconclusive. While some studies have reported a positive relationship between valence/volume and sales, others have failed to find any significant relationship. Using both lab experiments and real-world data, this dissertation addresses the conflicting findings from previous studies by introducing the role of the individual, the product, and firm-generated promotional message. In the first essay of the dissertation, I attempt to explain the inconsistencies in the literature by examining the moderating effect of regulatory focus on the relative role of valence versus volume of online reviews in consumer purchase decisions. Regulatory focus theory suggests that people tend to have either a promotion or a prevention orientation in approaching their desired goals. The current research argues that depending on consumers’ regulatory orientation, the effect of either review valence or review volume on consumers’ likelihood to purchase the product will become more salient. Moreover, specific products also activate a certain regulatory orientation. Therefore, depending on the products’ regulatory orientation, valence or volume of online reviews (i.e. valence and volume) will become more or less influential across different product categories. The second essay of the dissertation investigates the use of firm-generated promotional message to maximize online review volume versus valence effects. Specifically, it examines how a common online retail-marketing tactic, scarcity appeal, can be used to accentuate the effect of online review volume and valence on consumers’ purchase decisions. I argue that the mere presence of a scarcity appeal and the specific type of scarcity appeal used can influence the extent to which consumers weigh valence versus volume information. The integrative approach developed in this research advocates the simultaneous consideration of firm marketing tactics and consumer-generated content. It argues that firm-level actions can interact with online review components (i.e. volume and valence) to affect sales

Exploring the effects of scarcity, impulse buying, and product returning behavior in the fast fashion environment among female fashion conscious consumers

By nature, fashion is unpredictable. While other fashion retailers are struggle with lost profits from overstock and inflexibility of supply chains to follow quick trend changes, fast fashion retailers have turned these obstacles to their advantages over non-fast fashion retailers. The success of flexible supply chain management strategies results in a quicker response to new trends of fashion and a solution for strategic consumer behavior. Instead of delaying their purchase to take advantage of sale prices, consumers feel compelled to immediate purchase apparel products from fast fashion retailers because the availability of current designs are limited. Not only are the products available for a short amount of time due to frequent introduction of new designs, but also are scarce because of small batches of production and replenishment. Limited product availability has become a unique characteristic of the fast fashion retail environment. While several studies have thoroughly examined the success of the fast fashion environments, these previous studies have focused on the benefits of fast fashion from the retailers' perspective. There are few known studies that have examined consumer behavior in the fast fashion environment. Therefore, the purpose of the current research was to investigate the relationships that may exist among fashion consciousness, attitude, perception of product scarcity, impulse buying behavior, post-purchase emotional response, and product return behavior within the context of the fast fashion environment. Data were collected from a convenience sample of female undergraduate students. The final sample consisted of 175 female college students. Of these, approximately 56% were Caucasians and approximately 73% of participants were 18-21 years old. A series of regression analyses was employed to test all hypotheses. Results revealed that fashion consciousness had a positive influence on their attitude toward fast fashion retailers. We also found that fashion conscious values had a positive relationship with perceptions of scarcity within the fast fashion environment. In addition, we found that attitude toward fast fashion retailers and perceptions of scarcity were related to impulse buying behavior in the fast fashion environment. A significant relationship between impulse buying behavior and some negative post-purchase emotional responses was found. Lastly, results revealed that product return behavior in the fast fashion environment was positively influenced by some negative post-purchase emotional responses. Implications are provided. Limitations and future research directions are also discussed

Dark Patterns at Scale: Findings from a Crawl of 11K Shopping Websites

Dark patterns are user interface design choices that benefit an online service by coercing, steering, or deceiving users into making unintended and potentially harmful decisions. We present automated techniques that enable experts to identify dark patterns on a large set of websites. Using these techniques, we study shopping websites, which often use dark patterns to influence users into making more purchases or disclosing more information than they would otherwise. Analyzing ~53K product pages from ~11K shopping websites, we discover 1,818 dark pattern instances, together representing 15 types and 7 broader categories. We examine these dark patterns for deceptive practices, and find 183 websites that engage in such practices. We also uncover 22 third-party entities that offer dark patterns as a turnkey solution. Finally, we develop a taxonomy of dark pattern characteristics that describes the underlying influence of the dark patterns and their potential harm on user decision-making. Based on our findings, we make recommendations for stakeholders including researchers and regulators to study, mitigate, and minimize the use of these patterns.Comment: 32 pages, 11 figures, ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2019

How Digital Nudges Influence Consumers – Experimental Investigation in the Context of Retargeting

Retargeting is an innovative online marketing technique in the modern age. Although this advertising form offers great opportunities of bringing back customers who have left an online store without a complete purchase, retargeting is risky because the necessary data collection leads to strong privacy concerns which, in turn, trigger consumer reactance and decreasing trust. Digital nudges – small design modifications in digital choice environments which guide peoples’ behaviour – present a promising concept to bypass these negative consequences of retargeting. In order to prove the positive effects of digital nudges, we aim to conduct an online experiment with a subsequent survey by testing the impacts of social nudges and information nudges in retargeting banners. Our expected contribution to theory includes an extension of existing research of nudging in context of retargeting by investigating the effects of different nudges in retargeting banners on consumers’ behaviour. In addition, we aim to provide practical contributions by the provision of design guidelines for practitioners to build more trustworthy IT artefacts and enhance retargeting strategy of marketing practitioners

Unveiling the features of successful ebay sellers of smartphones: a data mining sales predictive model

JEL Classification guidelines (M310); (C380).EBay is one of the largest online retailing corporations worldwide, providing numerous ways for customer feedback on registered sellers. In accordance, with the advent of Web 2.0 and online shopping, an immensity of data is collected from manifold devices. This data is often unstructured, which inevitably asks for some form of further treatment that allows classification, discovery of patterns and trends or prediction of outcomes. That treatment implies the usage of increasingly complex and combined statistical tools as the size of datasets builds up. Nowadays, datasets may extend to several exabytes, which can be transformed into knowledge using adequate methods. The aim of the present study is to evaluate and analyse which and in what way seller and product attributes such as feedback ratings and price influence sales of smartphones on eBay using data mining framework and techniques. The methods used include SVM algorithms for modelling the sales of smartphones by eBay sellers combined with 10-fold cross-validation scheme which ensured model robustness and employment of metrics MAE, RAE and NMAE for the sake of gauging prediction accuracy followed by sensitivity analysis in order to assess the influence of individual features on sales. The methods were considered effective for both modelling evaluation and knowledge extraction reaching positive results although with some discrepancies between different prediction accuracy metrics. Lastly, it was discovered that the number of items in auction, average price and the variety of products available from a given seller were the most significant attributes, i.e., the largest contributors for sales.O EBay é uma das plataformas e retalho online de maior dimensão e abarca inúmeras oportunidades de extração de dados de feedback dos consumidores sobre vários vendedores. Em concordância, o advento da Web 2.0 e das compras online está fortemente associado à geração de dados em abundância e à possibilidade da sua respetiva recolha através de variados dispositivos e plataformas. Estes dados encontram-se, frequentemente, desestruturados o que inevitavelmente revela a necessidade da sua normalização e tratamento mais aprofundado de modo a possibilitar tarefas de classificação, descoberta de padrões e tendências ou de previsão. A complexidade dos métodos estatísticos aplicados para executar essas tarefas aumenta ao mesmo tempo que a dimensão das bases de dados. Atualmente, existem bases de dados que atingem vários exabytes e que se constituem como oportunidades para extração de conhecimento dado que métodos apropriados e particularizados sejam utilizados. Pretende-se, então, com o presente estudo quantificar e analisar quais e de que modo as características de vendedores e produtos influenciam as vendas de smartphones no eBay, recorrendo ao enquadramento conceptual e técnicas de mineração de dados. Os métodos utilizados incluem máquinas de vetores de suporte (SVMs) visando a modelação das vendas de smartphones por vendedores do eBay em combinação com validação cruzada 10-fold de modo a assegurar a robustez do modelo e com recurso às métricas de avaliação de desempenho erro absoluto médio (MAE), erro absoluto relativo (RAE) e erro absoluto médio normalizado (NMAE) para garantir a precisão do modelo preditivo. Seguidamente, é implementada a análise de sensibilidade para aferir a contribuição individual de cada atributo para as vendas. Os métodos são considerados eficazes tanto na avaliação do modelo como na extração de conhecimento visto que viabilizam resultados positivos ainda que sejam verificadas discrepâncias entre as estimativas para diferentes métricas de desempenho. Finalmente, foi possível descobrir que número de itens em leilão, o preço médio e a variedade de produtos disponibilizada por cada vendedor foram os atributos mais significantes, i.e., os que mais contribuíram para as vendas

The effect of trust, transaction utility, and product uniqueness on International Online Outshopping (IOO) intention and customer delight: the role of e-tailer’s country image

International Online Outshopping (IOO) is the virtual movement of consumers from one electronic marketplace to another across the globe with the intention of purchasing goods from the convenience of their homes, at the click of a button. With an increasing number of U.S. consumers looking to shop for apparel-related products at foreign websites, this recent IOO phenomenon has raised questions among e-tailers and academicians as to the characteristics of this new-age, international online outshopper and the nature of an IOO purchase. Though there have been significant efforts to understand the characteristics of an outshopper in prior research, the process of an IOO purchase is yet to be understood comprehensively, especially in identifying the antecedents and consequences of an IOO purchase. Moreover, understanding of the influence of consumers’ perception of the e-tailer’s country image on their IOO intention is limited. Filling these research gaps, the purpose of this study is to develop and test a comprehensive framework consisting of both the antecedents of initial IOO intention and emotional consequences of an IOO purchase. Built on Commitment-Trust Theory, Mental Accounting Theory, Commodity Theory, and The Model of Customer Delight. The research framework consisted of two phases. Phase I manipulated and tested the effect of three antecedents (i.e., trust in e-tailer, transaction utility and product uniqueness) on IOO intention and included country image (U.K. image and China image) as the moderator of these effects (H1a-c to H3a-c). Phase II manipulated and tested the effect of the above three antecedents on the Model of Customer Delight which includes the emotions of surprise, arousal, positive affect, and customer delight (H4a-b to H11a-b). Both phases were tested on U.S. consumers’ IOO purchase at Chinese and U.K. e-tailers, the top two IOO destinations for U.S. consumers as well as leading developing and developed country e-tailers, respectively. An experiment was conducted by developing 16 IOO scenarios consisting of all possible combinations of high and low levels of trust (2) x transaction utility (2) x product uniqueness (2) at both Chinese (8 scenarios) and U.K. (8 scenarios) e-tailer settings. Using Qualtrics to conduct the experiment, 539 usable responses (275 Chinese and 264 U.K. e-tailer setting) were collected from college students. Participants were randomly assigned to one of 16 scenarios at either Chinese or U.K. e-tailer setting. Pre-tests were conducted to validate and refine the manipulation of high and low levels of trust, transaction utility and product uniqueness prior to data collection. Upon manipulation of the scenarios, participants’ IOO intention and their emotions in the Model of Customer Delight were captured using items on Likert-type scales. The hypotheses in the causal model (research framework) were tested using multiple-sample Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). The findings of this study showed that, in Phase I, trust in an e-tailer positively influenced IOO intention at both Chinese and U.K. e-tailers (H1 a & b supported), transaction utility positively influenced IOO intention at U.K. e-tailers but not at Chinese e-tailers (H2a unsupported, H2b supported) and product uniqueness did not influence IOO intention at both Chinese and U.K. e-tailers (H3 a & b unsupported). Country image moderated only the relationship between transaction utility and IOO intention such that it was stronger in the U.K. than Chinese e-tailer settings; however, this effect was opposite to the strength that was hypothesized (H2c unsupported). There was no moderating effect of country image on the relationship between trust and IOO intention, and product uniqueness and IOO intention (H1c and H3c unsupported). The findings of Phase II revealed that trust was the only manipulated factor that influenced surprise while transaction utility and product uniqueness did not influence surprise. However, contrary to the hypothesis, this effect of trust on surprise was negative (H4 – H6 unsupported). Further analysis into this anomaly revealed that trust increased the level of surprise among consumers with no prior experience shopping at foreign websites, whereas it decreased the level of surprise among those with prior IOO experience. Finally, the relationships in the Model of Customer Delight were significant (H7 – H11 supported). This study extended the research in outshopping literature to understand the phenomenon of IOO by conducting an experimental study, thereby advancing the theoretical understanding of country image, online trust, transaction utility and customer delight. The findings of this study suggest to managers in the e-tailing industry that, developing a trustworthy website is the most important step towards generating purchase intention at that e-tailer’s website, regardless of the e-tailer’s country image. The limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are also provided