Enhancing personal interaction through the web interface in online shopping

At present, most e-commerce websites are low in social presence. Thus in contrast with traditional face-to-face business settings, they are difficult to satisfy online consumers’ social needs for interacting with other humans. Following this perspective, a significant number of literature calls for a need to improve e-commerce web sites’ social presence in addition to the well-recognized aspects of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. In this study, the author finds that within the context of an e-commerce web site selling electronic products (mobile phone), the adoption of interface design features of socially rich text and picture (enabling imaginary interaction with other humans) and virtual community (providing means for actual interaction with other humans) is an efficient way of increasing social presence. Results, however, also suggests that social presence per se is not significant in predicting online purchase intention. Even so, e-vendors may also benefit from offering high level of personal interaction on their e-commerce web sites as socially rich text and picture and virtual community have influential impacts on trust and perceived value, the two important predicators of purchase intention found in this study. Further analysis of the reasons behind are conducted and implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed.