The mediation of cognitive attitude for online shopping

The purpose of this paper is to explore the relationships among intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, flow, cognitive attitudes, perceived satisfaction, and purchase intention of consumers’ online shopping from a cognitive attitudes perspective. This study collected data from consumers having bought goods on the e-shopping platform.

This study adopted online questionnaire through my3q (www.my3q.com) for data collection. This research collected and analyzed 866 samples by using the structural equation modeling for validation of the proposed model.

The results indicated that hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, and privacy significantly affected cognitive attitudes (i.e. cognitive trust and perceived risk). Cognitive attitudes significantly affected perceived satisfaction and purchase intention, respectively. Flow significantly and positively influenced cognitive trust and purchase intentions, respectively. Cognitive trust is the mediators between motivations/flow and perceived satisfaction/purchase intention.

Both of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation can reflect the cognitive and conscious plan of an individual for a particular task. The cognitive trust and perceived risk are partial mediator and full mediator in the model, respectively. Hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, privacy, and flow all affect the individual’s perceived satisfaction and purchase intention through cognitive trust and perceived risk in the context of online shopping. Cognitive trust is a full mediator of the effects of privacy on purchase intention. It indicates that consumers must fully trust the website to ensure that the information provided by consumers in the transaction will not spread out for the protection of personal privacy.

This study aimed to assist the marketing personnel of the EC industry to examine the key influential factors of consumers’ purchase satisfactions and purchase intentions. The results of this study indicated that cognitive trust is the foundation for gaining and retaining customers. The classification of consumer motivations facilitates the understanding of consumers’ demands and accurate interpretation of consumers’ needs. The main influential factor of cognitive trust is utilitarian value. Therefore, this study states that the primary intrinsic motivation of online shopping for most consumers is utilitarian value (e.g. saving time, the cost of searching for the appropriate products, and increasing purchasing efficiency).

Websites should strengthen the quality and quantity of product information. In addition, websites should provide a dynamic presentation of the product by presenting in various forms (multimedia and text description) about product-related information in order to increase consumers’ hedonic value. For the aspects of security and privacy, websites should provide consumers with reliable safety features, such as secure socket layer or digital signature, smooth communication channel (specific phone services and e-mail address), and consumer’s privacy statements. Finally, web design should meet with the consumer experience model in order to make the website easy to use and order the purchase from the website directly. Websites should also increase the fluency and positive experience of consumers and improve the interaction of a website. Meanwhile, websites need to feedback the consumer problem instantly and provide customized information in order to increase the chance of interaction between the consumers and the website.

Relevant studies have explored online shopping from various perspectives, but few studies have examined consumers’ cognitive attitudes toward websites from the consumer motivation perspective. Thus, this study focussed on the influences of consumers’ intrinsic and extrinsic motivations (e.g. hedonic value, utilitarian value, security, and privacy) on their cognitive attitudes toward websites. In addition, with the rapid development of the internet in recent years, internet users’ online flow experiences have gained increased attention. The creation of attractive consumption conditions is vital for website managers to provide consumers with flow experiences. Therefore, this study included consumers’ flow in the proposed model.