Effects of Website Interactivity on Online Retail Shopping Behavior

Motivations to engage in retail online shopping can include both utilitarian and hedonic shopping dimensions. To cater to these consumers, online retailers can create a cognitively and esthetically rich shopping environment, through sophisticated levels of interactive web utilities and features, offering not only utilitarian benefits and attributes but also providing hedonic benefits of enjoyment. Since the effect of interactive websites has proven to stimulate online consumer’s perceptions, this study presumes that websites with multimedia rich interactive utilities and features can influence online consumers’ shopping motivations and entice them to modify or even transform their original shopping predispositions by providing them with attractive and enhanced interactive features and controls, thus generating a positive attitude towards products and services offered by the retailer. This study seeks to explore the effects of Web interactivity on online consumer behavior through an attitudinal model of technology acceptance.