Terry L. Childers, Christopher L. Carr, Joann Peck, Stephen Carson

Consumers have many different reasons for utilizing the web to engage in online retail shopping and consumption. Among these are functional motivations consisting, for example, of seeking product information, making price comparisons, and engaging in online purchases. However, consumers are increasingly seeking online enjoyment as well through, for example, listening to music, watching videos, subscribing to music concerts, and participating in movie cast calls- At various points in time, consumers may vary in the degree to which they are driven to use the web for these functional versus entertainment benefits. Our research seeks to understand these motivations by conducting two studies that vary in their functional (utilitarian) versus enjoyment (hedonic) benefits.

This article assesses interactive shopping attitudes by examining three factors that relate to user acceptance of new technology (1) usefulness of the technology, (2) the technologies ease of use, and (3) enjoyment of the technology. These issues are related in our framework to key media design aspects drawn from research on online consumer behavior and psychology. Key to the adoption of online shopping is the ability to navigate through the online environment and the convenience of shopping from one's home 24 hours a day 7 days week. However besides these benefits, the online environment lacks the ability to directly experience products, unlike a bricks and mortar retail store. When online consumers are unable to touch, feel, smell, or taste prospective purchases are they deterred from online purchasing? Our research examines how the benefits of self directed navigation and convenience versus the limitation relating to the lack of direct product experience relate to consumer perceptions of the usefulness, ease of use and enjoyment of online retail shopping.

Across our two studies, we find that enjoyment is a consistent and strong predictor of attitude toward interactive shopping. In addition, consumers that perceive the interactive environment to be useful and easy to use also have stronger more positive attitudes toward online shopping. In addition, we find that these motivations can vary based upon the goals of the consumer. Across our two studies, we compare the more typical web-shopping environment to a more functionally oriented context of online grocery shopping. We find that the usefulness of interactive shopping is a stronger predictor of attitudes in a grocery shopping context than the typical web-shopping environment. On the other hand, we found that enjoyment was a stronger predictor of attitudes for web shopping than for online grocery shopping.

The convenience of online shopping was a strong predictor of usefulness for both web-shopping and online grocery shopping. Additionally, the ability to navigate the interactive environment was a strong predictor of online shopping enjoyment. Finally, when consumers feel the interactive environment provides an acceptable substitute for direct examination of products they feel online shopping is more useful and derive more enjoyment from online shopping.

The results of our research suggest that developers of interactive shopping environments must incorporate in the design of these environments elements that will boost both consumer functionality and the enjoyment of online shopping. In fact, it may well be that consumers may expect more enjoyment aspects in their interactive environment than found in a more traditional bricks and mortar retail store environment. This conclusion is speculative at this point and needs additional research, but results to date indicate that the immersive/hedonic aspects of online shopping are at least as important to consumers as the more functional aspects of providing product information and enabling online purchasing.

In addition, we urge developers of online retail shopping sites to consider the overall webmospherics of their site. We suggest that the webmosphere, like the atmospherics of a bricks and mortar retail store, must be configured to provide both a useful and enjoyable shopping experience. This virtual environment counterpart to the physical retail store includes such structural design attributes as the use of frames, pop-ups, and one-click checkout, media dimensions, such as, the use of streaming video, audio, and graphics, as well as layout dimensions relating to the organization and grouping of merchandise. Each webmospheric dimension represents an important set of design choices that when combined comprise a virtual shopping environment that can either facilitate or detract from the consumer's interactive shopping experience. These issues will become even more challenging as broadband usage penetrates the homes of online consumers providing a platform for the continued enrichment of interactive retail shopping.