Using the Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale to identify innovative Internet consumers

A total of 117 student consumers participated in a longitudinal survey of their purchasing behavior for three product categories: snack foods, CDs, and skin care. The Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale was included in the survey to measure how innovative participants were with regard to buying online. It was hypothesized that an innovative predisposition toward online buying would be associated positively with more hours of Internet use, greater Internet purchasing, higher likelihood of future Internet purchase, and use of the Internet to download music. The data analyses confirmed all these hypotheses. Few respondent demographics, however, were related to any of these variables. These results demonstrate that the Domain Specific Innovativeness Scale is a reliable and valid measure of this potentially important construct; and that Internet innovativeness functions as predicted by theories of consumer innovative behavior, thereby increasing the generalizability of these theories and yielding potentially important information for e‐commerce managers.