THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL PRESENCE ON THE EXPERIENCES OF ONLINE SHOPPERS - A Cross-Cultural Study

Khaled Hassanein, Milena Head, Chunhua Ju

2007

Abstract

A notable difference between online and offline shopping that is hindering the growth of e-Commerce is the decreased presence of human and social elements in the online environment. This paper explores how human warmth and sociability can be integrated through the Web interface to positively impact online consumer perceptions. More specifically, the impact of design elements (emotive text and socially-rich pictures) is explored across two national cultures: Canadian and Chinese. Our results show increased levels of social presence through socially-rich design elements (i.e. socially-rich text and pictures) as having a positive impact on antecedents of attitude/intention of Canadian online shoppers (perceived usefulness, trust and enjoyment). We were also able to demonstrate similar results with Chinese online consumers in the case of perceived usefulness and enjoyment but not for trust. The paper concludes with a discussion of these results outlining implications for practitioners and directions for future research.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Hassanein K., Head M. and Ju C. (2007). THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL PRESENCE ON THE EXPERIENCES OF ONLINE SHOPPERS - A Cross-Cultural Study . In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS, ISBN 978-972-8865-92-4, pages 11-18. DOI: 10.5220/0002354300110018

in Bibtex Style

@conference{iceis07,
author={Khaled Hassanein and Milena Head and Chunhua Ju},
title={THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL PRESENCE ON THE EXPERIENCES OF ONLINE SHOPPERS - A Cross-Cultural Study},
booktitle={Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,},
year={2007},
pages={11-18},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0002354300110018},
isbn={978-972-8865-92-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF
JO - Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - Volume 5: ICEIS,
TI - THE IMPACT OF SOCIAL PRESENCE ON THE EXPERIENCES OF ONLINE SHOPPERS - A Cross-Cultural Study
SN - 978-972-8865-92-4
AU - Hassanein K.
AU - Head M.
AU - Ju C.
PY - 2007
SP - 11
EP - 18
DO - 10.5220/0002354300110018