Are you an emotional shopper?

Recently, online auction sites have identified a new window to attract more consumers.  The answer is through emotional shoppers.  Online auction sites have appealed to emotional shoppers through new exciting shopping processes.  These include searching and bidding! 

Pooler indicates that a new perspective of shopping has emerged.  In the past, people used the traditional perspective of shopping where shopping was perceived as acquiring needed goods and services based on practical and rational shopping decisions.  However, nowadays, people go shopping to reward themselves, to satisfy their emotional needs and to make them feel good (2003)(Lee, Kim, Lee, p. 50, 2010).  If your reasons to go shopping relate to the ladder, then you are known as an emotional shopper!  This new emergence has resulted and translated into a consumer’s excitement, arousal and enjoyment when experiencing shopping activities.  Recently, researchers have linked e-commerce activities to emotional shopping.  This vulnerability in the consumer attracts online auction sites and they are looking for new ways to target and appeal consumers.    

The article Adventure versus gratification: Emotional shopping in online auctions by Min-Young Lee, Youn-Kyung Kim and Hyun-Joo Lee analyze this phenomena and come up with results that will help online auction retailers develop tailored strategies for their targeted consumer groups.      

You may be wondering: How does this work? What are the success factors? The authors explain that one significant success factor is the fun of participating in the auction process.  “If a consumer bids for a product at an online auction site for a pleasurable shopping experience, this experience cannot be obtained when he opts to purchase the product at a ‘known’ regular price through a non-auction channel.  It is the emotional consumer who is likely to engage in online auctions” (Lee, Kim, Lee, p. 51, 2010). 

Findings suggest that the emotional aspect of online auctions can be summarized by 3 factors: variety in shopping, exploration, and active play.  “After successful bidding, the shopper ‘wins’ the item, more than ‘buys’ it.  The thrill of bidding and excitement of winning certainly meet the need of the emotional shopper (Ariely and Simonson, 2003; Standifird et al., 2005). 

The analyses of their study proceeded in two stages:

1.  A cluster analysis uncovered auction shopper segments that emerged from the two dimensions of emotional shopping motivation.
2. Regression analyses determined the predictive powers of demographic and psychographic variables in discriminating auction shopper segments. 

The study identified online auction shopper segments based on emotional motivations and examined the role of demographic and psychographic characteristics in profiling auction shopper segments.  Four auction shopper segments were identified: enthusiastic, adventure-oriented, gratification-oriented, and apathetic shoppers.  The demographic values that the researchers selected include: Age, gender, income and education.  Whereas, the psychographics profiles include impulsiveness, variety-seeking, price sensitivity, risk-consciousness. 

Several interesting findings include:

• Impulsiveness is a significant predictor to differentiate shopper segments.  Specifically, enthusiastic shoppers present high impulsiveness, while apathetic shoppers present low impulsiveness. 
• Variety-seeking tendency is a significant variable to discriminate enthusiastic shoppers and adventure-oriented shoppers from apathetic shoppers. 
• Gratification-oriented shoppers, compared to adventure-oriented shoppers, had more female shoppers.  They represented a positive relationship with impulsiveness, whereas this relationship was negative to adventure-oriented shoppers.  Therefore, their shopping decision seems to be impulsive, and they may satisfy their needs by enjoying web atmospherics or unexpected events displayed on the sites. 
• Adventure-oriented shoppers had more male shoppers than gratification-oriented shoppers did.  Men have been traditionally viewed as goal-oriented shoppers; however, the thrill of winning in auction shopping combined with advanced technology may boost their adventurous feeling.    

For more interesting findings and further reading be sure to check out their article!

Post by: 

Paulina Enrriquez Dominguez

Sources:

• http://americanlivewire.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Holiday-Shopping-online.jpg
• http://www.bestonlineshoppingsites.org/wp-content/gallery/online-shopping-stores/blog-online-shopping.jpg
• http://uncc.worldcat.org/title/adventure-versus-gratification-emotional-shopping-in-online-auctions/oclc/828001722&referer=brief_results