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Although considerable evidence shows that online product reviews (OPRs) can greatly affect consumers, how interface designs of OPR systems (i.e. websites where consumers read and write OPRs) impact online buying behavior has not yet been well investigated. Using research on confidence in judgment and the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) framework, this study aims to develop a model of the effects of OPR system design on consumer purchase behavior.

A study using a two by two by two factorial experimental design was conducted. The structural model with AMOS 23 based on 319 useable data points was tested.

Findings are very interesting. First, designs that manipulate positions of reviews impact perceived value but surprisingly have no effects on confidence in judgment. Second, designs using default display order based on helpfulness votes rather than on recency of reviews increase confidence to a higher level. Third, although unstructured organization methods are used by many major OPR systems, they are inferior in enhancing consumers’ emotional reactions to structured ones.

This paper highlights the need for more academic research on how interface designs of online product review systems impact purchase behavior. Additionally, this study emphasizes the need for examining how confidence in judgment is impacted in the online environment.

For practitioners, this research provides them with design implications on how to increase consumer purchase behavior.

This research enhances the understanding of the effects of OPR system interface design on purchase behavior. In addition, the current paper sheds light on how confidence in judgment, given its importance in reducing online consumer’s hesitance to buy, is impacted by various interface designs of OPR systems. Furthermore, this study applies the SOR framework to the context of OPR system designs.

This paper aims to understand what kind of fashion product picture can arouse greater embodied mental simulation at two distinct steps of consumers' shopping journey (choice between options and purchase intention).

Two experimental studies were developed. Study 1 (n = 169) investigated consumers' purchase intention, and Study 2 (n = 156) investigated consumers' choice for a T-shirt displayed in an e-commerce store. The authors manipulated the product picture by considering pictures with the presence or absence of a human model wearing the product (flat vs. mannequin vs. human model without a face vs. human model with a face).

Consumers demonstrated greater choice and purchase intention for the picture that aroused greater embodied mental simulation. Different pictures aroused greater embodied mental simulation depending on the consumer journey step (choice between two options or purchase intention). Perceived product attractiveness influenced this finding.

The data on men and women were analyzed together due to the low number of male participants in both studies.

The results suggest that mannequin pictures should be used in situations involving product evaluation (e-commerce categories' pages) and that pictures with human models should be used in situations entailing further analysis of the product (e-commerce product page) to encourage purchase decisions. E-commerce managers also need to use pictures of human models when the product is viewed as less attractive.

This research investigated embodied mental simulation around product pictures at two distinct steps of consumers' shopping journey.

Taking the perfect perspective of customers' satisfaction, this paper aims to investigate the elements affecting customer satisfaction in business-to-consumer (B2C) online retailing stores, which are divided into five non-monetary dimensions: trust, order fulfillment, website construction, excitement and interaction.

Due to distinguishing the suitability of the data, the authors used exploratory factor analysis (EFA). Next, the authors utilized confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to check their validity. Then, the authors applied Cronbach's alpha to check the reliability of the elements. After that, the authors combined these five elements with structural equation modeling (SEM) to make a model. The authors also performed Friedman tests to prioritize the elements.

The results indicate that each element is undeniably significant and has an extraordinary impact on customers' satisfaction evaluation. Therefore, system providers and electronic retailers need to consider them on their websites to achieve marketing goals in the competitive online environments.

Electronic commerce has resulted in an essential change in B2C marketing, especially in the electronic retailing industry. Online suppliers need to satisfy their customers to receive competitive advantages and increase their income. The purpose of this study is to research the elements affecting customers' satisfaction in B2C online retailing stores.

The purpose of this study is to conceptually integrate business to consumer (B2C) into business to business (B2B), with a holistic consumer-centric, technology-reinforced, long-term vision for tourism industries and companies to survive and succeed in the era of new technologies 4.0. The research suggests that the tourism-marketing-new technologies decision-making involves customers as the center of the design and decision process.

The research design includes a qualitative study with 94 in-depth interviews, a literature analysis and a conceptual proposition. The qualitative study follows the tourism consumer desire data analysis, from categorization to integration. The literature analysis applies a systematic literature review approach based on the 29 most up-to-date new-tech papers from peer-reviewed journals. The analysis compares qualitative research findings and literature analysis results and matches the new technology applications with consumer desire understanding. The conceptual framework of tourism marketing/advertising is proposed based on qualitative research and literature analysis.

The qualitative research deciphers that consumers, based on their imagination and memorization, desire therapy and sceneries and connect such desires to the empathetic and resonating advertising messages. The literature analysis synthesizes the new tech applications in tourism and matches the qualitative research findings with the deciphered desires in tourism. The conceptual model proposes that B2C should be integrated into B2B to provide value for both consumers and businesses and opens avenues of research on this topic.

This research has made the following theoretical contributions: it offers an in-depth understanding of consumer desire, often hidden or subconscious, in the field of tourism. Consumer desires regarding tourism are mostly subconscious and exist long before consumers are exposed to advertising messages. These desires reflect the search for therapy and sceneries and become “embodied” – they exist on multisensorial levels and become part of the body and life and will lead consumers into positive perceptions when marketing communications/advertisements resonate with them. In the latter case, they will subjectively judge advertising as “good,” regardless of the advertising design quality. The research also connects consumer research with a new technologies research review and proposes a conceptual framework to integrate business to consumer (B2C) with business to business (B2B). As such, the research makes theoretical contributions to the integration or the “boundary blurring” between B2C and B2B research and practical suggestions that involved industries and consumers may all benefit from such integration. Conceptually, there is a lack of discussions of the pitfalls of new technologies, a dearth of empirical verification of the applications of new technologies in the proposed fields and a shortage of discussions about ethical issues. Qualitative methods, offering an efficient tool for understanding consumer desires in the tourism industry, have their own limits, as discussed in previous research. The sample is limited to the state of New York population and may be influenced by geographic, demographic and psychological characteristics related to the region.

This research provides advertising practitioners, new technology innovators and tourism industries with a framework to face the combined challenges of understanding hidden consumer desires and applying adequate technologies that resonate with consumer desires to tackle relevant issues. The conceptual proposition of this research fills the gap between qualitative consumer research without concrete practical resolution and new technologies applications without in-depth consumer understanding. Through the conceptual framework, the author provides insights into how industries may benefit from consumer understanding. The business relationships among the industries of marketing, tourism and new technologies should be centered around consumers. Thus, B2C and B2B should be naturally integrated into business practices.

Social implications of this research include three major points: first, the understanding of consumer desire for therapeutic power in tourism, which invites more attention to tourism as part of social well-being design instead of a purely for-profit business. Second, a profound comprehension of what consumers need and desire, without which the applications of new technologies may cause severe societal problems. Third, a way to tailor to consumers’ individuality and desires for advertising/marketing that may be considered abusive, stressful and socially destructive if applied in a nonpersonal manner.

Conceptually, this research adds consumer desire, an originally B2C concept, to the B2B context regarding the new technology applications in tourism marketing/advertising. It contributes to the B2B literature by proposing a strong consumer-centric approach, especially the consumer desire understanding, that is not yet investigated in the B2B literature; and a combination of empirical study and literature analysis and the matching of the two for better practice of advertising/marketing, tourism and new technologies applications.

For online experiential products, tactile attributes are important but hard-to-achieve features. This research aims to explore consumers' emotional experiences by incorporating tactile attributes into the online clothing shopping scenario.

This paper presents two online shopping experiments by consumers who purchase online clothing: one experiment involves subjects browsing clothing products on a computer screen; the other one involves subjects touching the clothing fabric while browsing a corresponding product on a computer screen. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model, a physiological polygraph was used to record the emotional experience of subjects under the stimuli of “sight” and “sight + touch.”

(1) Subjects had a more positive emotional arousal under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (2) the visual merchandising of clothing and expected touch task affect subjects' overall emotional experience with clothing, and with a good visual experience and expected tactile experience, the subjects showed a more positive emotional valence under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (3) differing from previous research, this experimental data only supports the hypothesis that the skin conductance indicator is related to the level of emotional arousal, without supporting its correlation with emotional valence. However, the heart rate indicator is correlated with emotional valence but not with emotional arousal.

This work proposes a way to study the tactile attributes of online clothing and enriches the theoretical framework of polygraph and the S-O-R model for the research of online experiential products, and in terms of application, it sheds light on sales strategies of online experiential products for retailers and brand owners.

This paper aims to analyze the effect of temporal experiences on the visualization of advertising appeals in the banking sector. More specifically, this study investigates the effectiveness of advertising messages that use close-up “vs” long-shot images and influence objective temporality as a driver of visual attention.

One experiment was done through visual attention using an eye-tracking application. This investigation included the participation of 238 volunteers viewing 2 different types of advertising appeals: savings accounts and bank cards. The advertising appeals brought manipulations of close-up “vs” long-shot images.

The authors' findings indicate that close-up images increase visual attention in advertising appeals. On the other hand, the presence of long-shot images reduces visual attention in advertising appeals. Furthermore, the eye-tracking results revealed that long-short images constantly decreased with the passing of objective temporality. In contrast, close-up images had the first moment of increased visual attention levels followed by a fall toward the end of objective temporality.

The manipulation of image format differences can increase attention and memory effects. For this reason, the interaction between objective temporality and close-up “vs” long-shot images must be considered more carefully than has been done so far. This article reflects on this care and points the way to future research agendas.

The purpose of this study is to review and analyze the status of word-of-mouth (WOM) research in the business-to-business (B2B) context and discuss and identify new possible future directions.

A systematic review was conducted and 36 articles on B2B WOM were collected to evaluate the current state of the literature and clarify possible future research directions.

This thematic analysis categorize these articles into three themes: WOM generation, WOM usage and reference marketing. Under each theme, the authors reveal research findings unique to B2B research and different from business-to-consumer (B2C) WOM research. This study identifies several research questions that should be addressed by future research.

Both academic researchers and business practitioners recognize that WOM plays an essential role in B2B marketing. However, no review paper focuses on WOM in the B2B context. Findings in the B2C WOM literature suggest that WOM substantially influences firms’ performance, but that managers cannot simply attempt to extrapolate B2C findings to the B2B arena. By synthesizing and assessing prior research on WOM in the B2B context, this study contributes to a better understanding of the B2B WOM phenomenon and facilitates future research on this topic.

The research aims to qualitatively explore e-marketplace service quality (EMSQ) from the perspective of an industrial buyer as a sole decision-maker. It further intends to quantitatively examine its impact on the industrial buyer's perceived value (PV), overall satisfaction (SAT), and e-loyalty (ELOY) in the context of business-to-government (B2G) e-commerce.

The research used an exploratory sequential mixed-method design. A qualitative exploratory study of EMSQ was conducted using a Straussian grounded theory (GT) technique, followed by an explanatory quantitative study using PLS-SEM to evaluate causal links between various research variables.

In the area of e-services, the investigation found that the hierarchical structure of EMSQ encompasses six broadly applicable dimensions and one B2G context-specific dimension of the e-governance process quality. The study also reinforced previous research findings in the B2C and B2B e-commerce domains, highlighting that e-service quality positively impacts online buyer's PV, SAT and ELOY.

This research contributed to the area of e-service operations by developing and validating the EMSQ model in the B2G e-commerce settings. Further, it has opened up new research avenues in B2G e-commerce.

The findings from this research highlighted that e-service operations managers should focus on usability, technological concerns, product/vendor quality concerns, customer support reliability, along with effective e-governance, ordering and logistics processes for e-business success. It also provides policymakers with guidelines for making B2G e-marketplaces sustainable.

To the best of the author's knowledge, this is the first study employing the GT and PLS-SEM techniques to explore EMSQ from the viewpoint of industrial buyers in B2G e-commerce. The study contributed to prior literature by proposing and validating the hierarchical EMSQ model.

Supply chains are under increased scrutiny as consumers have become aware of the dark side of downstream production practices. Many articles and exposés have led consumers to be more conscious of purchasing products from companies who source materials in a socially responsible and ethical manner. As a result, business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumers (B2C) companies are under increased pressure to source raw materials in a transparent and ethical way. Because of the associated costs, companies then look to benefit from increased brand equity by promoting to consumers how ethical their products are. The purpose of this study is to look at the case of the food industry to analyze sustainability messaging on Twitter in both B2B and B2C companies to determine which of the dimensions of sustainability (people, profit, planet) are being emphasized.

In this study, two published dictionaries were combined to capture the three dimensions of “sustainability,” and these scales were then used to analyze Twitter posts. This study created a unique software package to classify, mine, collect and analyze Twitter data. This study used these tools to analyze 246,386 Twitter posts within a sample of 39 leading B2C and B2B food companies over a 10-year period (2012–2021) to explore brand messaging and engagement rate.

This research revealed several interesting results. These include how B2B companies have emphasized the employee (people) dimensions of sustainability, while B2C companies have had a more balanced approach that overall has prioritized the economic dimension (profit) of sustainability. The data on audience engagement revealed a mismatch between the types of sustainability messaging B2B companies and B2C companies in the food industry are posting and what engages audiences.

This study fills several gaps, including analyzing how B2B and B2C companies use sustainability language in their social media brand management, as well as looking at which dimensions of sustainability they emphasize and which ones engage audiences the most. This research is also novel in combining multiple existing scales under one project to analyze the triple bottom line in the analysis of qualitative texts.

This research paper aims to examine two hybrid models of logistics service quality (LSQ) and its influence on satisfaction, loyalty and future purchase intention in a business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce context. This study extends the literature for LSQ by incorporating the second-order assurance quality construct, which comprises personnel contact quality, order discrepancy handling and order returns, into one of the hybrid models.

A survey-based approach is used to collect data. Participant responses to questions concerning multiple LSQ dimensions and behavioral perceptions from their most recent online shopping experience are measured using structural equation modeling.

Findings highlight the importance of including a second-order construct assurance quality as a more explanatory model. Results illustrate that online ordering procedures and assurance quality impact customer satisfaction more than other prominent LSQ dimensions. Furthermore, the findings revealed a customer loyalty is a partial mediator between customer satisfaction and future purchase intention. This underscores the significance of improved logistics services as a competitive edge for e-commerce retailers.

Implications are limited to the e-commerce B2C domain.

The findings of this study underscore critical LSQ dimensions that garner greater satisfaction and retention in the online shopping experience. The results indicate that the effective and efficient handling of the initial order and any order problem significantly influences customer satisfaction and reaps the long-term benefits of customer retention.

The authors present and empirically test a hybrid model of LSQ in a B2C e-commerce domain that captures many of the important elements of the customer experience as espoused in the literature.