Shopping Online - Determining Consumer Acceptance of Online Shops

After more than ten years of widespread use of e-commerce, there are still only a few models to specify the connection between consumer acceptance and the characteristics of an online shop. In particular, the available literature does not provide any constructs to evaluate the most basic functionality of an online shop: its search features. In this paper we describe a shopping experiment to validate a model that includes consumer characteristics as well as consumers' evaluations of a shop's search features. Results demonstrate that (i) contrary to consumer research findings, only consumer involvement influences the consumers' evaluation of the online shop, not the prior product knowledge; (ii) the relevance of search results and the evaluation of filtering mechanisms have a major impact on the perceived usefulness of the shop; and (iii) the ease of use of the shop does not affect perceived usefulness, as this relationship is fully mediated by the perceived costs of the information search process.