Virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a new context for gaming, collaboration, social networking but also commercial activity. This paper focuses on the latter, and investigates how consumers behave in this virtual context when selecting stores they visit or buy from. The paper explores store selection criteria in virtual world stores and extends earlier research in both offline and online commercial environments, taking into account the novel IT capabilities that VWs exploit. Theoretical insights drawn from the marketing and information systems literature have been used to guide the design of a survey conducted in the virtual world Second Life. In addition to identifying the factors influencing store selection, the paper investigates how these differ between shoppers and non-shoppers, and identifies the factors that affect the amount of money spent in virtual world shopping environments. The findings suggest that ''Core Store Features'' and ''Security and Privacy'' constitute the most important store selection factors in virtual environments and that sales in VWs are predicted by the frequency of visiting and the time spent within VWs' stores.
Virtual world dynamics and motivation for the studyA Virtual World (VW) is defined as a "computer-simulated three-dimensional (3D) environment" [11, p.525]. Virtual Worlds have been developed since the last decade, exploiting the available information and Internet technology capabilities, attracting increasing numbers of users. Some of these worlds can be accessed through a web browser, while others require downloading and using specialized software. The origin of VWs is considered to be both social networking and gaming [52]. Some VWs started as games and consequently adopted new services, capabilities and even their own virtual currency. The variety of activities and possibilities depends on each VW's orientation (e.g., education, socialization, entertainment, commerce, etc). Several VWs develop and grow dynamically through their inhabitants' (i.e., users') actions.Users in a VW interact [45] with others through their "avatar", "a representation of the user as an animated character in virtual worlds" [47, p.17], and engage in numerous activities such as information sharing, talking with friends or finding new friends, playing games, creating new services, building virtual objects, buying and selling goods, and so on. They can communicate with others through synchronous text messages, voice chat, e-mails, or videoconferencing.Retailing activity also gained momentum in VWs, with users buying and selling virtual or real products [34]. Recent studies suggest that Virtual Commerce (V-Commerce) should be considered as a totally new and well promising retailing channel [27,28,78]. According to Kzero [41], the revenues in VWs reached $6 billion in 2012 and by 2018, VWs will have been one of the most important business platforms [35]. The overall consumer virtual reality market over the five year period of 2014 to 2018 will worth $16.2 bn, with an average compound ann...