The more interactivity the better? Investigating interactivity, task complexity, and product knowledge in online purchas
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The more interactivity the better? Investigating interactivity, task complexity, and product knowledge in online purchase decisions Fengchun Tang1
© Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract This study examines the joint effects of interactivity, task complexity, and product knowledge on customers’ online purchase decision quality. Interactivity is defined as the extent to which users can participate in modifying the form and content of a mediated environment in real-time. For example, users sort products on a website based on certain criteria (e.g., price). An experiment with 264 participants was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results suggest that interactivity and task complexity jointly affect customers’ online purchase decision quality. When customers perform a complex task, interactivity reduces the cognitive resources needed to perform the task and thus improves customers’ decision quality. However, when customers perform a simple task, interactivity worsens the mismatch between the cognitive resources available and what is required, leading to deteriorated decision quality. Similarly, product knowledge and task complexity interact to influence customers’ decision quality. Product knowledge improves decision quality when customers perform a complex task, whereas it results in deteriorated decision quality when customers perform a simple task. In addition, interactivity interacts with product knowledge to affect customers’ intention to revisit the website. Specifically, interactivity has a stronger effect on customers’ intention to revisit the website when the customer has more product knowledge. Keywords Interactivity · Task complexity · Product knowledge · E-commerce · Experiment
1 Introduction With the rapid growth of online sales in the last decades, e-retailers continuously invest in web-based technologies to assist customers in online shopping [24]. Among various web-based technologies to support customers’ online purchase decision process, interactivity is considered to be an essential feature in website design [8]. Interactivity enables the flexibility of information processing. With interactivity, users are able to control how it flows when they navigate the website and tailor the content available on the website and its display according to their needs [21]. By incorporating interactivity into website design, e-retailers expect to
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s10799-020-00316-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Fengchun Tang [email protected] 1
Virginia Commonwealth University, 301 West Main Street, Richmond, VA 23284, USA
enhance customers’ online shopping experience and thus attract new customers and retain existing ones. Despite the importance of and increasing interests in interactivity, the benefits of interactivity have not been fully established in empirical studies [8, 38]. While interactivity is presumably associated with positive atti
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