Exploring the impact of personality traits on online shopping behavior

With online shops (e-stores) popping up at a rapid rate in the 21st century, brick-and-mortar stores (physical stores) are no longer the only outlet that attracts consumer spending. Compared with their physical store cousins, e-stores offer more diverse product choices, individualized products and service information, shopping convenience, and privacy. The purpose of this article is mainly to investigate the impacts of personality traits of e-shoppers on their purchase behavior. A structural equation model is developed to test the causal effects between those constructs. The empirical results show that (1) hedonic purchase motivation is positively influenced by three of the big five traits: neuroticism, extraversion, and openness to experience; (2) when consumers have higher degrees of neuroticism, agreeableness, or openness to experience, they tend to be utility-motivated to shop online; (3) utilitarian purchase motivation is a key factor that invokes the search intention in consumers while hedonic motivation is not. The managerial implications for business mangers, the limitations of this study, and further research ideas for future researchers are discussed indepth.