Consumer Value in Electronic Retailing: A Laboratory Experiment in Buying Cloths

Electronic retailing is expected to affect consumer behaviour many ways through creating new consumer value. In this paper, we adopt a mixed value approach to the consumer value problem in the context of electronic retailing of clothing. We attempt to discover the dominant value patterns that best characterize the underlying consumer value patterns motivating consumers in their purchase situation. In order to do so, we designed a laboratory experiment with 28 participants. Our findings suggest that even in a relatively simple laboratory setting such as ours, consumers are motivated by a number of drivers, not all of which are covered by the concept of economic rationality. They tend to factor multiple value components into their purchase decisions, yet a relatively limited set of value categories of economic, instrumental, and hedonic value goes a long way towards explaining consumer purchase decisions in electronic retailing.