The Influence of Avatars on Online Consumer Shopping Behavior

Abstract

An impediment to Web-based retail sales is the impersonal nature of Web-based shopping. A solution to this problem is to use an avatar to deliver product information. An avatar is a graphic representation that can be animated by means of computer technology. Study 1 shows that using an avatar sales agent leads to more satisfaction with the retailer, a more positive attitude toward the product, and a greater purchase intention. Study 2 shows that an attractive avatar is a more effective sales agent at moderate levels of product involvement, but an expert avatar is a more effective sales agent at high levels of product involvement.

Modeling Consumer Purchasing Behavior in Social Shopping Communities with Clickstream Data

“…The more this feature is used, the greater the likelihood of a click-out. This implies the importance of Downloaded by [University of Nebraska, Lincoln] at 04:53 13 April 2015 30 OlbRICH and HOlsIng price within the purchasing process. Accordingly, our hypotheses regarding the direct shopping features (H5(a)-(g)) are supported for six of the seven direct shopping features.…”

“…We also found that community members are more likely to make a click-out than ordinary users. This implies that community members are more profitable.KEY WORDS AND PHRASES: Clickstream data, online consumer purchasing behavior, social shopping, user-generated content, virtual community.Parallel to the increasing importance of the Internet as a shopping channel [30,77], the advent of Web 2.0 is rapidly moving the online landscape into a truly consumer-driven era [8,19,75]. Web 2.0 provides consumers with many methods of creating and sharing user-generated content (UGC) [23,58,80].…”

“…Parallel to the increasing importance of the Internet as a shopping channel [30,77], the advent of Web 2.0 is rapidly moving the online landscape into a truly consumer-driven era [8,19,75]. Web 2.0 provides consumers with many methods of creating and sharing user-generated content (UGC) [23,58,80].…”

Evaluating Anthropomorphic Product Recommendation Agents: A Social Relationship Perspective to Designing Information Systems

“…these designs have also been evaluated in various application contexts, such as computer-aided learning [31] and electronic commerce [49,55,77]. a summary of empirical evaluations of anthropomorphic interfaces is provided in appendix a.…”

“…this design may have also undermined the validity of the results because people may have very different experiences when actually interacting with an agent to perform a real shopping task. In a recent study by Holzwarth et al [49], participants were asked to interact with and evaluate humanoid agents designed to deliver product information in an online shopping Web site. However, these agents only helped shoppers customize a product rather than recommended what to buy.…”