The Cause Of Live-Chat Medium Usage,and Its Influence On Consumer’s Purchase Decision

Online shopping has progressed beyond consumers passively browsing through pages of products to them actively engaging in communication dialogs with product sellers. Consumers could directly contact and ask the sellers on the interested products by clicking on the onsite instant seller dialog communication feature, which we termed as Live-Chat medium. To gain a holistic understanding of the use of such technology, this research engages in a two-stage, multi-method empirical investigation to answer two related questions:1) why is Live-Chat medium used, and2) how is the Live-Chat medium used? In the first study, we build on the motivation-opportunity-ability framework to propose three antecedents of Live-Chat medium usage, namely perceived personal expertise, perceived information asymmetry, and perceived information privacy concern, which in turn reduces purchase uncertainty through enhancement in interactivity and social presence. A survey involving183online consumers validated the proposed conceptual model. In order to further explore how the technology usage influences customer’s actual purchase decision, the second study consists of a content analysis of a shopping website’s communication logs to identify the nature of communication between consumers and sellers that lead to eventual purchases. In total, we analyze1,698communication sessions and trace their purchase decisions to identify the pertinent communication characteristics leading to eventual purchases. This work contributes to our understanding of online shopping support technology usage by extending the MOA framework and adds to the broader line of research on online purchase decision behavior.