Shopping in a Virtual Reality: A Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) based Systematic Literature Review

The virtual reality (VR) technology has become increasingly relevant in recent years due to the advantages that occur through the representation of the real within a virtual world. One promising application area of VR is virtual shopping, i.e., providing customers with the ability to visit virtual stores instead of purchasing products on 2D websites or brick-and-mortar stores. To gain insights into the opportunities of the technology in the realm of shopping, we emphasize and discuss the literature on the use of VR for shopping based on a systematic literature review, thereby deepening our understanding of virtual retail concepts and synthesizing the empirical evidence on the advantages of VR. For this purpose, we developed a Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) based framework to summarize the key findings. The results comprise suggestions for VR shopping applications as well as possible future research avenues