Consumers' experiences with e-commerce technologies: Three essays

Three essays are offered to help create a fuller understanding of consumers' e-commerce experiences. The first essay presents a philosophical/conceptual framework for understanding these experiences. It is followed by two empirical essays.; Essay one presents post-humanism, a perspective developed in sociology to explain the activities and processes underlying scientific inventions as well as technological devices and practices. It is based on the idea that humans and non-human material objects are jointly responsible for shaping experiences. The essay begins with an in-depth discussion of how technology and information technology products are defined. This discussion is followed by a review and critique of existing models, such as diffusion of innovation, that have been used for studying consumer-technology experiences in marketing and information systems. Three key tenets of post-humanism are presented and examples of how this perspective can extend and enrich the findings of existing consumer behavior studies are discussed.; Essay two explores consumers' e-commerce experiences through a series of in-depth interviews with and videotaped observations of seven key informants. Blending ideas from post-humanism, cybernetics, and ethnomethodology, a conversational metaphor is presented for understanding e-commerce behavior, in which consumers “converse” with a cyborgic entity—the company/website—that is neither fully human nor fully non-human. In line with the social conventions and structural characteristics of human-to-human conversations, three types of “shared understandings” develop between consumers and company/websites: familiarity; trust and control; and success. Within each shared understanding, several illustrative behaviors are identified and described. These consumer-website conversations provide the building blocks for the development of five different types of marketing relationships, which are also identified and described.; Essay three explores the effect of online shipping charges on consumers' e-commerce purchase decisions. (Such purchase decisions relate in part to two of the three shared understandings: trust/control and success.) Two experiments were conducted with college students using a simulated e-commerce website. The first experiment examined how the amount of the shipping charge and the way it is framed (bundled with or separate from the merchandise price) influence the decision to purchase a CD storage unit online or at a conventional retail store. The second experiment examined the influence of framing and online merchandise return policies on purchase decisions. Relevant theory was drawn from prospect theory and mental accounting principles.