Abstract
This paper proposes and tests a model to explain how consumers‟ perceptions of product presentation technologies may affect online impulse buying. Data from a laboratory experiment (N = 212), which were analyzed using a structural equation modeling approach, showed that vividness and interactivity of online product presentations increased the participants‟ perceptions of local presence, which refers to the sense of a product being present with a consumer in his or her own environment. Local presence, in turn, influenced the urge to buy impulsively by generating both cognitive (perceived risk) and affective (product affect) product responses. The implications of these results are discussed.
6. Discussion and conclusions
With online impulse buying on the rise, understanding how such behavior is triggered is vital for both marketing professionals and researchers. By creating and testing a model that focuses on consumers‟ perceptions of online product presentations, the present study sheds light on the impact of an important web store characteristic that has not yet been addressed by previous studies, i.e., local presence. The results of our experimental study offer three main findings, the implications of which will be discussed below. First, the study is the first to apply the concept of local presence in the context of online impulse buying. The present study has placed the concept into a nomological network that is rooted in a theory on presence [56], the CLT [60], and the literature on impulse buying [64, 70], thereby creating a model that integrates these different streams of research. By focusing on local presence, as opposed to the more widely adopted concept of telepresence, the present study has demonstrated that vivid and interactive product presentations can seemingly transport products from the online shopping environment to the consumer. In the context of brick-and-mortar shopping, the importance of physical proximity to products has been shown to increase consumers‟ impulsivity [46].
