فراتر از خرید و فروش : استفاده از انگیزش ها در پس سبد خرید مصرف کنندگان آنلاین

The authors investigate consumers' motivations for placing items in an online shopping cart with or without buying, termed virtual cart use. While retailers offer virtual carts as a functional holding space for intended online purchases, this study, based on a national online sample, reveals other powerful utilitarian and hedonic motivations that explain the frequency of consumers' online cart use. Beyond current purchase intentions, the investigated reasons for why consumers place items in their carts include: securing online price promotions, obtaining more information on certain products, organizing shopping items, and entertainment. Based on empirical findings, the authors offer managerial suggestions for enhancing online shopping-to-buying conversion rates.

1.1. Importance of understanding online cart use With electronic commerce becoming a crucial aspect of marketing strategy and customer relations, there is a growing need for developing new knowledge, models and theories on Internet customer behavior. One frequent consumer behavior that managers and scholars have begun to investigate is a pressing managerial and multi-channel concern — online shopping cart abandonment (Kukar-Kinney and Close, 2010 and Oliver and Shor, 2003). Yet, prior to explaining why consumers abandon their online carts, it is vital to understand motivations to use an online shopping cart in the first place. The authors define electronic shopping cart use as an online behavior in which a consumer places item(s) of interest in an online shopping cart. The motivations for these synergistic and at times opposing online behaviors (placing an item in a cart and purchasing during that session versus abandoning the purchase) may be different, as theories of motivation and online consumer behavior suggest. Traditional on-ground shopping carts (e.g., grocery carts) are utilitarian, physical carts or baskets that bricks-and-mortar retailers provide customers to assist them with gathering and storing items for immediate purchase. Electronic carts, on the other hand, are virtual spaces that exist on shopping websites and are provided with a similar purpose as traditional carts — to let customers store items for subsequent purchase at that shopping session. Retailers use also other terms, such as “my bag”, to refer to the online carts (e.g., Gap.com). Some websites keep consumers' electronic carts full after the consumer logs off without purchasing (i.e., persistent carts), but many sites automatically empty carts when the consumer closes the browser. While e-tailers offer virtual carts to assist consumers with online purchasing, consumers' virtual cart use may not necessarily result from the need to store goods for immediate purchase (i.e., the purpose carts are designed for). Unlike traditional shopping carts, consumers may use their virtual carts as an online browsing or window shopping tool rather than an online purchase tool. Thus, the focus of the present research is to determine what motivates shoppers to use their online shopping carts — beyond the functional view of simply considering consumers' cart use as purchase intent. 1.2. Objectives While reasons for on-ground cart use are relatively intuitive and practical (i.e., to hold items for the purchase at hand), researchers have yet to investigate consumers' reasons for placing items in a virtual cart. Thus, the aim of this research is to provide a theoretical model for scholars to build upon and empirical implications to aid retail managers to develop online carts that match consumers' needs. Specifically, the objective here is to build on theories of motivation to develop understanding of online shoppers' motivations for placing items in their electronic shopping carts. Further, the authors seek to understand the relationship between online cart use and online purchasing. In order to accomplish these objectives, the authors develop a framework explaining the frequency of both virtual cart use and the frequency of subsequent online purchasing. While there is an emerging stream of research on motivations for online shopping (e.g., Noble et al., 2006, Rohm and Swaminathan, 2004 and To et al., 2007), to the authors' knowledge there are no studies explaining consumers' reasons for using online carts beyond immediate purchase intent. While managers intend, and perhaps assume, that their customers use carts solely as the place to store items prior to immediate online purchase, this research proposes other utilitarian as well as hedonic reasons for online cart use. These may include entertainment value of virtually acquiring desired items, wanting more information on an item, using the cart as a wish list of desired items, or taking advantage of a price promotion such as free shipping. 1.3. Overview of the article First, the authors present a background and theory development along with a review of literature on motivations for online shopping in the areas of entertainment, pricing, shopping organization and information search to explain consumers' online cart use and online purchasing. Based on an intertwining of consumer behavior theories and electronic commerce literature, a set of hypotheses supports a framework explaining the frequency of virtual cart use and online buying. The authors then describe the online survey method and the national sample used to test the model. The article closes with a summary of the study's contributions, managerial implications, limitations and opportunities for future research.

While the data support majority of the proposed hypotheses, there are two exceptions. First, entertainment use decreases the frequency of online shopping cart use, rather than increases. Interestingly, a direct examination of the correlation between entertainment purpose and frequency of online shopping cart placement (i.e., not via a structural equation model) shows that this relationship is significant and positive (ρ = .12, p < .05). The above discrepancy may have arisen because of the use of structural equation modeling, which accounts for multiple predictor effects at the same time, any correlations among the predictors, as well as any measurement error. Thus, beyond other investigated predictors, entertainment purpose is not able to contribute individually to increased shopping cart use; instead, entertainment-based motivations result in decreased consumers' cart use. Hence, consumers who are shopping for fun, entertainment, or to escape boredom may be content merely browsing from page to page, rather than actively engaging in putting items into their virtual shopping cart. The second surprising outcome is a lack of significant relationship between research and information search intent and the frequency of online cart use. While retailers design their online shopping sites to be information-based, virtual carts do not appear to serve consumers as a tool to further research the products of interest; instead, consumers seem to be able to sufficiently search for and gather information about products without the necessity of placing the items of interest into their carts. The present examination of online cart use reveals that consumers do not necessarily place items in their carts to obtain more information on the product. In fact, online shoppers may refrain from placing an item of interest into their virtual cart without upfront product or availability information. Thus, it is crucial that retailers provide such information to consumers prior to requiring them to place an item of interest in their shopping cart.