Online Consumer Behaviour in Low Involvement Products: Cognitive Attributes and Purchase Behaviour

Abstract

The internet has created fundamental shifts in business and consumer behaviour, akin to the industrial revolution of the 1800s. The internet serves as a ubiquitous and limitless information platform, and is leading to massive changes in the current structures of economic transactions. Along with the changes in economic practices, it is modifying consumer behaviour and marketing practices as well. This research explores better understanding of online customer decision making, in low involvement product category, with special focus on identification of consumer cognition factors which play a significant role in online purchase intention. Specifically, we look at, (a) patterns of online purchase in grocery purchase orders; (b) differences in purchase and non-purchase behaviour; (c) online purchase behaviour of each grocery category; and (d) effects of cognitive attributes on online grocery purchase behaviour. Data is collected through a formal collaboration with a leading online grocery store in India, and has the following key variables source-websites, intra-click-time, number-of-clicks, purchase value, customer type, order type, technology used, web-browsers, first/repeat buyers, purchase/non-purchase, navigational choices, grocery-categories, need for cognition, cognitive bias, cognitive load, and purchase intention. Multi-method research design is used and raw weblog files (messy data) is cleaned/prepared before analysis. Data mining techniques CART decision trees, Neural network, Association rules, Bayesian Network, Regression, and significance tests are utilized. Findings suggest purchase order values are significantly higher for apple mobile phone users; there are significant differences in consumer’s choice of navigation for technology used; time has differential influence on grocery categories for various paths towards purchase decisions; each grocery category is influenced differently by source websites and navigational choices, cognitive attributes can be used to predict purchase of online groceries, and cognitive attributes have differential influence on each grocery category. Findings of study have implication for online retail, consumer behaviour, and online purchase behaviour.