Online+Shopping

__**THE ROLE OF PERSONALITY TRAITS AND PERCEIVED VALUES IN PERSUASION: AN ELABORATION LIKELIHOOD MODEL PERSPECTIVE ON ONLINE SHOPPING **__
 * by Samuel Schoonover **

In recent years, the progress of electronic communication infrastructures has sparked a lot of attention. The influences of personality traits and virtual surroundings are two of a number of important issues that can determine consumers’ willingness to engage in online shopping. A few comprehensive studies have been conducted related to how the interactions of personality traits and virtual surroundings can impact individuals’ beliefs, attitudes, and purchasing intention.

According to the classical attitude model, consumers initially form beliefs about certain objects by accumulating knowledge with regard to certain attributes of the objects. Once these beliefs are formed, certain feelings toward the product will follow. Eventually consumers’ behavior is based on those affective responses. While this CAB attitude model may be useful in explaining the purchasing of high-involvement products, it may not be applicable in the case of online shopping, especially for the low-involvement and high-experiential product. It is suggested that the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986; Rucker & Petty, 2006) may be more appropriate to explain the phenomenon of online persuasion. According to the ELM, the route to persuasion depends on people’s elaboration level, and this elaboration level can be used to understand how people deal with persuasive messages. Many researchers have viewed involvement and being “hands-on” as two important variables to decide whether consumers will process persuasive messages through a central route or a peripheral route. Involvement is more oriented around searching for information on the quality of the product, whereas heuristics are more environment-oriented.

Individuals with greater agreeableness are good-natured, gentle, friendly, and generous and these characteristics can create more positive cognitive responses to the other party. The consumer’s approach behavior toward online shopping is almost fully explained by the shopper’s beliefs about the contents of the website and if the ratings are trustworthy. The perceived values of the website which consequently result in a positive attitude toward, and trust of, online shopping help highlight the approach, too. When answering the question of how this classical attitude model can be moderated by personality traits, further study is still needed.

Because of the virtual environment, building and maintaining a long-term relationship of trust with online shoppers is complex. Trust in online shopping is referred to as a willingness of customers to be vulnerable to the description of the product or to the action. Trust helps customers lesson worries about the risks and insecurities and encourages them to participate in online activities. They become more comfortable and do not see why they did not trust in online shopping before. Their research results from the online shopping study are varied. Several limitations exist in this study that suggest areas and directions for future research. This study does not include a full range of shopping values and contains a limited number of ideas. Future researchers can apply this research framework to traditional retailers by including more shopping values. When conducting this study, a convenience sample was used, and when generalizing the results, they should be limited to the size of the selected sample. Also, The survey methodology was adopted to empirically test the underlying relationships and hypotheses. This approach is perfect in capturing the statistically significant findings and researching the ways of the market place, however, it may not capture unexplained differences in product that could offer more detailed characteristics.

[]