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The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of low task relevant cues presented on apparel web sites on consumer emotions (pleasure and arousal) that in turn influence consumer response behaviors (purchase intention and approach behavior) and examine the influence of product involvement as a moderator of the relationship between such cues and emotions.

A total of 157 female students participated in an online experiment using mock web sites. The paper employed a 2×2 between‐subjects factorial design: low task relevant web cues (presence vs absence) and product involvement (low vs high).

The results revealed that low task relevant web cues induce more pleasure and arousal for online browsers with low levels of clothing product involvement than for those with high levels of clothing product involvement. The results also showed that emotions mediated the relationship between low task relevant web cues and various consumer response behaviors.

The sample of the study was female college students. The relatively homogeneous sample may limit the generalizability of the results.

The paper provides an important implication for online apparel retailers developing web sites that may increase consumer pleasure and arousal and attract consumers with different levels of product involvement.

No study has examined a moderating effect of product involvement, an enduring involvement, between low task relevant web cues and consumer pleasure and arousal. The paper provides understanding of how low task relevant web cues influence consumers with different levels of product involvement.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how an E-retailer's assistive intent impacts the perceptions and behaviours of online shoppers. The paper introduces a model that explains and examines the process through which the perceived assistive intent of an E-retailer leads to improved patronage intentions towards the web site.

A survey on the most recent e-purchase experiences of more than 600 individuals in North America was conducted. Structural equation modelling based on EQS 6.1 was used to assess the measurement and structural models.

Results indicated that customers’ impressions of an E-retailer's assistive intent positively impact web site patronage intentions both directly and indirectly through two key constructs of e-shopping, including web site involvement and web site attitudes.

The student sample is not representative of the population. Students are familiar with internet and feel less need for assistance online. Another shortcoming might be its settings. Since the survey was on the respondents’ most recent online experiences, the data quality depends on the amount and accuracy of the information they could retrieve from memory.

The findings suggest that E-retailers would highly benefit from investing in the development of an assistive image. To do so, E-retailers should leverage the interactive nature of the web and provide supportive tools that facilitate the e-shopping task of clients.

Developing impressions of the site's assistive intent is highly rewarding for E-retailers that are new to the business.

This paper represents the first effort to link the newly developed construct of E-retailer's assistive intent to two fundamental variables of online shopping, including web site involvement and web site attitudes. This work would also be an extension of the past studies that call for further investigation of the link between customer orientation and customer's loyalty intentions.

The main objective of this paper is to compare consumers' online shopping behavior across three types of services (i.e. search, experience, and credence). Reviewing the marketing and psychology literatures, this study aims to propose that consumers' emotions (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) influence their perception of site atmospheric cues (site informativeness, effectiveness, and entertainment), which, in turn, impact consumers' site attitudes, site involvement, and purchase intention. It also aims to test the proposed model for three major types of services (i.e. search, experience, and credence) and to compare the path coefficients of all the relationships in the model across the three groups.

Lab experiments were conducted for data collection and structural equation modeling was utilized for multi‐group analysis.

The results supported the proposed model and revealed several non‐invariant structural paths across the three groups.

The student sample may not represent the general population.

Search‐, experience‐, and credence‐based services should attempt to evoke the most desired consumer emotional types (pleasure, arousal, and dominance).

Unlike many other studies in services marketing, this paper tests the proposed model across different service types to increase the generalizability of the results.

The purpose of this paper is to identify starting points for improving corporate self‐presentation on the world wide web (WWW) by enhancing site usability, message credibility, and information utility.

Content analysis, quantitative linguistic analysis and discourse analysis were used to examine the “About Us” sections of 20 well‐known corporate web sites.

The findings suggest that companies recognise the challenges provided by WWW‐mediated communication but fail to respond adequately. The companies could enhance their web sites by adopting a more user‐centred approach, constructing more convincing arguments and raising the level of interactivity in order to present their audiences with more relevant information.

The findings of this study are limited by the fast‐paced nature of the internet. The content and structure of the pages may have changed substantially since the research was conducted.

Companies need to pay more attention to the fact that the WWW as a pull medium empowers users to choose the material they want to be exposed to. Therefore, companies need to make more efforts to entice users to see material they would otherwise not choose to see.

In view of the small body of qualitative research on corporate web sites, particularly regarding the use of language, the challenges of corporate web communication and the responses identified may provide a framework for future research, e.g. for longitudinal studies. Practitioners may use the findings to redesign the content and structure of corporate web sites.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of interactive and social features on users' online experiences and their purchase intention of virtual goods from a social network site.

A banner with a hyperlink that connected to the author's web survey was posted on the homepage of Facebook. Of the 258 responses returned, 176 were fully completed. Measurement items were adapted from previous literature. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to evaluate the research model and hypotheses testing.

The results of an empirical study supported the use of the stimuli‐organism‐response (S‐O‐R) model in a social networking site and showed how environmental features should be incorporated to enhance users' online experiences and purchase intentions. Specifically, social identity showed the strongest influence on involvement and flow. More specifically, affective involvement showed the greatest influence on purchase intention compared to flow and cognitive involvement.

The relative importance of both interactivity and social identity in platform features in shaping consumers' online experiences should not be ignored. The author suggests online games or apps. Additionally, platform providers should advance social identity features that show a strong positive impact on users' online experiences.

With the proliferation of online social gaming, there is growing evidence for virtual goods consumption; however, relatively few studies have discussed this phenomenon. This paper draws on hypotheses from environmental psychology; specifically, users' intentions to purchase are modeled on user responses to the online stimuli of a Web platform and the online experience that such an environment elicits.

Following the proliferation of e‐commerce and the Internet, there has been increasing interest in the evaluation of Web sites. However, most research on service quality evaluation has focused on people‐based services, rather than technologically‐based services. Specifically there is a paucity of research addressing service quality offered through Web sites. This paper addresses this issue by exploring critical factors in Web site service quality perceptions, using the critical incident technique. The paper further evaluates whether the same factors contribute to high and low quality perceptions. Additionally, the paper investigates the effect of the customer's search behavior while visiting the Web site (goal directed or experiential) on service quality perceptions. Implications for managers are addressed.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how online trust affects group shopping intention in the Ihergo web site.

Samples from the Ihergo web site were collected by mailing a questionnaire survey to those who agreed to participate.

Group‐buying operators need to understand their consumers and the scheduling shopping rules between internet shoppers and firms. Moreover, word‐of‐mouth (WOM) can be created online by offering web visitors the ability to access the opinions of satisfied customers.

An online business may adopt different methods to enhance its customer satisfaction level. When people enter a significant amount of personal data at a web site, they are typically reluctant to change vendors and enter the data again.

Customers view a group‐buying operator as a shopping expert, and expect that the group‐buying operator can handle shopping problems before a dispute occurs.

The findings of this study provide interesting insights for group‐buying operators interested in group‐buying commerce; consumers having a high level of interest in shopping possess a strong motivation and desire to interact with the group‐buying operator.

As evidence mounts on the importance of small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) to national and international economies and the opportunities presented to them by the internet, it becomes important to understand the key issues which determine internet adoption and utilisation. With literature on SME internet adoption fragmented and incoherent, there is also a need for conceptual framework development and testing to provide more focused research in this important area. Several researchers have also highlighted a need for research which concentrates more on specific industrial sectors rather than taking a more generalist approach to SME internet adoption. Within this evolving research context, the agri‐food industry makes a particularly relevant area of study, which this paper aims to study.

This paper addresses this purpose by conducting a study of 50 Northern Ireland SME agri‐food companies. The study utilises and tests a conceptual framework derived from the extant literature in relation to the determinants of SME web site adoption and utilisation.

The findings of this study point to the need for SME agri‐food companies to develop an awareness of the internet's efficacy for their business and a subsequent dynamic strategic approach in adoption and utilisation. However, the lack of marketing ability and negative industry norms prevalent within developed economy agri‐food industries will contribute negatively to internet adoption and utilisation. These will need to be addressed if the internet, and web site adoption and utilisation in particular, are to provide an effective business tool. The research findings support the conceptual framework's usefulness as a research tool. The findings point to the importance of marketing ability and industry norms in relation to their impact on the central determinants of internet adoption by the SME agri‐food companies studied.

In this paper it is contended that a lack of marketing ability and negative industry attitudes towards internet adoption and utilisation will constrain levels of awareness of the efficacy of the internet as a business tool for the individual businesses researched. The findings reveal that this will subsequently contribute to a lack of strategic web site development and subsequent utilisation.

This study seeks to develop a framework of analysis that categorizes features of e‐government web site design in a matrix of knowledge‐acquiring process versus learners' values. The proposed framework supports a development plan for a cyber governmental web site that may involve all aspects of a learning process.

A framework for analysis is first proposed. Data were obtained from 137 part‐time students during a class. Participants were requested to enter the Bureau of Foreign Trade (BOFT) web site to learn a subject of their choice in a computer lab. The instruments used for obtaining their opinions were open‐ended questionnaires. Two focus group interviews were also conducted. An iterative analyzing strategy based on grounded theory was employed to obtain the results.

Analytical results of the data based on the framework reveals many insights. Participants indicated that navigational aids, knowledge contents and other designs related to interactive knowledge sharing are important. Nevertheless, e‐government webmasters often ignore these important features. The proposed framework is a valuable tool for web site development and maintenance.

Although many theories about the usability of e‐government web sites have been proposed, the needs of individual learners have seldom been addressed. Since learning is critical to economic prosperity and social cohesion, the factors that make an e‐government web site supportive for learners should be explored. This study is, to our knowledge, the first to examine an e‐government web site from a learner perspective. Furthermore, this investigation presents a framework that facilitates analyzing and improving e‐government web sites.

The purpose of this work is to analyse the relationship between click‐through rate (CTR) and the traditional measurements of advertising effectiveness and to measure the advertising effectiveness of two less common formats of online advertising in blogs: rectangle and contextual, as well as to explore which factors influence that effectiveness.

A survey was used to gather data. Advertising effectiveness was determined using the traditional measurements employed for conventional media at cognitive, affective and conative levels and analysing the CTR.

The results reflect a direct relation between measurements of effectiveness and CTR, differences in the effectiveness of the two advertising formats, and that the factors influencing that effectiveness are attitude toward the web site, involvement with the product and duration of web site visit.

The main limitation of the study is that the experimental design is focused on two types of formats inserted into two types of blog and about only one product. A further limitation is the need to analyse other factors that may influence the effectiveness.

The principal conclusion of the study is that managers should not evaluate the effectiveness of their online campaigns by using only the CTR.

Despite the increase in their use, blogs have not received attention in the field of advertising research.