Online shopping has recently been evolving more toward the subject area of collaborative online shopping (COS), and customer satisfaction is one of the key determinants for the success of COS. In this study, we investigate the effect of product type and gender and their interaction with customer satisfaction through user involvement in a collaborative online shopping context.
We developed a lab experiment with a mixed two-by-two factorial design to test the proposed research model. We chose gender (male versus female) as the between-subjects factor and product type (utilitarian product versus hedonic product) as the within-subjects factor.
The obtained results indicate that collaborative shopping may require group members to be more involved for a hedonic product than a utilitarian product. When collaboratively shopping for utilitarian products, male groups tend to show a higher level of involvement than female groups. In contrast, female groups show a higher level of involvement than male groups when collaboratively shopping for hedonic products. Furthermore, our results indicate that greater involvement in COS may lead to higher satisfaction.
Websites that sell hedonic products should first adopt the design elements that support COS. Meanwhile, online sellers should be aware that the gender gap still exists as online shopping evolves toward social online shopping. In addition, COS websites should provide more design elements (e.g. co-browsing, avatar embodiment, video chat and voting tools) to stimulate user involvement.
In this paper, we employ the theory of consumption values, which decomposes COS value into the utilitarian and hedonic dimensions, as a theoretical foundation to investigate the effect of product type and gender together as well as their interactions in the COS context. The obtained findings may provide various insights and empirical evidence to improve the understanding of how to target male and female customers across different product types in the COS context.
