Prior studies investigating business-to-consumer e-commerce have focused predominantly on online shopping by individuals on their own, although consumers often desire to conduct their shopping activities with others. This study explores the important, but seldom studied, topic of collaborative online shopping. It investigates two design components that are pertinent to collaborative online shopping support tools, namely, navigation support and communication support. Results from a laboratory experiment indicate that compared to separate navigation, shared navigation effectively reduces uncoupling (i.e., the loss of coordination with one's shopping partner) incidents per product discussed and leads to fewer communication exchanges dedicated to resolving each uncoupling incident, thereby enhancing coordination performance. Compared to text chat, voice chat does not help reduce the occurrence of uncoupling, but likely increases the efficiency in resolving uncoupling. The results further show that shared navigation and voice chat can significantly enhance the collaborative shoppers' perceptions of social presence derived from their online shopping experiences. The interaction effect on social presence implies that the benefit of shared navigation is higher in the presence of text chat than in the presence of voice chat.
Internet-based interactive multimedia technologies enable online firms to employ a variety of formats to present and promote their products: They can use pictures, videos, and sounds to depict products, as well as give consumers the opportunity to try out products virtually. Despite the several previous endeavors that studied the effects of different product presentation formats, the functional mechanisms underlying these presentation methods have not been investigated in a comprehensive way. This paper investigates a model showing how these functional mechanisms (namely, vividness and interactivity) influence consumers' intentions to return to a website and their intentions to purchase products. A study conducted to test this model has largely confirmed our expectations: (1) both vividness and interactivity of product presentations are the primary design features that influence the efficacy of the presentations; (2) consumers' perceptions of the diagnosticity of websites, their perceptions of the compatibility between online shopping and physical shopping, and their shopping enjoyment derived from a particular online shopping experience jointly influence consumers' attitudes toward shopping at a website; and (3) both consumers' attitudes toward products and their attitudes toward shopping at a website contribute to their intentions to purchase the products displayed on the website.
The development of electronic commerce has been constrained by the inability of online consumers to feel, touch, and sample products through Web interfaces, as they are able to do in conventional in-store shopping. Previous academic studies have argued that this limitation could be partly alleviated by providing consumers with virtual product experience (VPE) to enable potential customers to experience products virtually. This paper discusses virtual control, a specific type of VPE implementation, and identifies its two dimensions: visual control and functional control. Visual control enables consumers to manipulate Web product images, to view products from various angles and distances; functional control enables consumers to explore and experience different features and functions of products. The individual and joint effects of visual and functional control were investigated in a laboratory experiment, the results of which indicated that visual and functional control increased the perceived diagnostic (i.e., the extent to which a consumer believes the shopping experience is helpful to evaluate a product) of their corresponding attribute factors, and that both visual and functional control increased consumer overall perceived diagnosticity and flow.