The role of website experience in building attitude and intention towards online shopping

Since technology has become an inseparable part of consumers’ lives, understanding acceptance and use of technology at individual consumer level has become a must for marketing theory and practice. To explain consumers’ acceptance of a new technology, the present study uses the unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as the theoretical foundation. It then proposes extending UTAUT through incorporating a hedonic dimension, which should be an important predictor in explaining technology acceptancy in a consumer context such as on-line shopping, especially where experiential products—like apparel—are involved. The proposed hedonic dimension is perceived playfulness, which itself has two first-order latent antecedents; vividness and embodied cognition. Vividness —visual in this case—is related to the vividness of the shopping environment as represented on-line and to what extent its visual cues stimulate consumers to form strong (as opposed to weak) mental images of the product that they seek to buy. Embodied cognition represents the relationship between the pre-existing knowledge that is saved in mind and body. The present study also reintroduces attitude to the model as an important construct in predicting purchase intention. To test the proposed model’s ability to explain technology acceptance in different cultural contexts, the model is empirically tested via an experiment and a survey in a western country—the UK—and a non-western country—The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (HKJ). Two hundred and twenty two questionnaires are collected from the UK and 258 questionnaires are collected from the HKJ. Findings suggest that the incorporated hedonic dimension is as important as the utilitarian dimension in explaining technology acceptance in consumer context in both western and non-western countries. A positive relationship between perceived playfulness and purchase intention is found. However, attitude is partially mediating the relationship between perceived playfulness and purchase intention. Social influence is also found to be a predictor of attitude in the HKJ, but not in the UK. Theoretical and practical contributions of these findings are exhibited and roots of future research are proposed.