Why Do Some Consumers Still Prefer In-Store Shopping? An Exploration of Online Shopping Cart Abandonment Behavior

Abstract

Shopping cart abandonment remains a challenge for many e-retailers despite the continued growth of the e-commerce industry worldwide. However, the issue of online shopping cart abandonment (OSCA) has not been explored extensively in the literature. Grounded by the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) model, this study explores a sequential mediation model comprising consumers' wait for lower prices as an antecedent, hesitation at checkout and OSCA as mediators, perceived transaction inconvenience as a moderator, and decision to buy from a land-based retailer (DBLR) as an outcome. An online questionnaire was designed and distributed to 883 online consumers in Mainland China. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyze the survey data. The results show that waiting for lower prices positively influences hesitation at checkout, and subsequently, impacts both OSCA and DBLR. Hesitation at checkout and OSCA play sequential mediating roles in the framework path. In addition, perceived transaction inconvenience strengthens the relationship between waiting for lower prices and hesitation at checkout. Overall, this study contributes to theory and serves as a guideline for e-retailers in reducing the OSCA rate.

Online shopping cart abandonment: A review and research agenda

“…Price: Monetary aspects that significantly influence consumers' motivation to proceed with shopping activities (Song, 2019). The literature suggests that price is an important factor influencing OSCA (Cho et al, 2006;Kapoor & Vij, 2021;Mishra et al, 2021aMishra et al, , 2021bPadigela & Suguna, 2021;Song, 2019;Wang et al, 2021), in where, OSCA tends to increase as price rises.…”

“…Website design: Websites with special features will distract consumers from their ultimate shopping goals (Garaus, 2018). Particularly, the characteristics of website design (browsing structure, information content, and graphic style) can influence service quality evaluation and consumer satisfaction with virtual channels (Lee & Lin, 2005) Transaction inconvenience: Perceived transaction inconvenience associated with the slow loading of web pages, a complex transaction process, and the need to register for multiple accounts lead to a greater tendency to abandon one's shopping cart (Kapoor & Vij, 2021;Rajamma et al, 2009;Wang et al, 2021).…”

“…Second, we noticed that OSCA behavior can generate barriers at different stages of purchase (Li et al, 2021), especially the technical aspects (i.e., website design, transaction convenience) that play a crucial factor in the acceptance and rejection of OSCA behavior (Wang et al, 2021). However, the existing publications have relatively homogeneous and obsolete theoretical applications, which lack of coherent theoretical base to explain the complex decision-making behavior of consumers.…”

“…The literature suggests that the mediators (i.e., uncertainty factors), moderators (i.e., considerations factors), and outcomes (i.e., OSCA and purchase intention) of OSCA are influenced by various antecedent variables, including contextual‐related antecedents, such as the price changes in the external environment (Wang et al 2021), perceived risk, such as trust risk, personal factors, such as entertainment purpose (Kukar‐Kinney & Close, 2010), and technological factors, such as transaction inconvenience (Kapoor & Vij, 2021). Accordingly, we have classified all those antecedents into four categories, that is contextual factors, perceived risk factors, personal factors, and technological factors.…”

Evaluating the Effectiveness of Digital Content Marketing Under Mixed Reality Training Platform on the Online Purchase Intention

“…If the contents of an advertisement bores its audience or fails to give confidence to the audience, most of them will close the pop-up commercials as soon as possible and even install pop-up blockers. In contrast, Internet users today appreciate advertising messages that are customized, valuable, and under control ( Xu et al, 2020 ; Ali et al, 2021 ; Liu et al, 2021 ; Siddique et al, 2021 ; Jamil et al, 2022 ; Shiyong et al, 2022 ; Wang et al, 2022 ).…”