Understanding online purchase decision making: The effects of unconscious thought, information quality, and information quantity

The prosperity of online shopping has led e-commerce vendors to provide increasingly rich information, particularly for experience products, to enhance consumers‘ shopping experience and satisfaction. However, there is little awareness that consumers may not be able to process all the information available because of human beings‘ limited capacity to process information. Online shoppers could be easily confused when facing rich information, particularly when the information greatly exceeds their processing capacity. In contrast to previous research which has focused on the formatting of appropriate information or user interfaces to solve the information overload problem, this study explores a new solution based on the role of unconscious thought. Integrating information processing theory and the unconscious thought theory, the current study examines the different roles of information quantity, information quality and the thought mode in consumers‘ decision satisfaction, in the presence of rich information. Our results show that unconscious thought moderates the relationship between information quality and consumer satisfaction towards their decision making, and is thus worthy of special attention in the design of e-commerce web pages. Moreover, unconscious thoughts show a significant impact on the decision process involving experience products but not search products, indicating a possible boundary of its usage which was ignored in previous literature. The study contributes to both unconscious thought theory and information processing theory by exploring the interaction effect of the quality and quantity of information with thought mode in affecting the quality of purchasing decisions.