The Role of Interactivity in Interent Business on Customer Experiential Values and Behavioral Intentions

Customers' experiential value is based on holistic experience customers would have when they interact with a product/service. Experiential value is defined as " relativistic preference characterizing a subject's experience with some object " (Holbrook, 1994). Internet is characterized for interactivity and it should have a role in customers' experiential value. Therefore, this research investigates the role of interactivity (e-store interaction, C2C interaction, and content interaction) and web store utility on intrinsic and extrinsic customer experiential value. The final dependent variable is behavioral intentions. To test the research model, a survey was designed to capture online consumers' perception of interactivity within e-stores, experiential value, and behavioral intentions. The survey was conducted in South Korea due to its advancement in e-commerce (Reuter, 2010) and 354 usable responses were gathered. 98% of the respondents had experience in online purchasing showing the maturity of e-commerce in South Korea. SPSS 18.0 and AMOS 18.0 were used to analyze for reliability, validity, model fits and SEM. The result showed strong influence of e-store interaction, C2C interaction, and content interaction on intrinsic customer experiential value. Content interaction and web store utility had positive relationships with extrinsic customer experiential value. Intrinsic customer experiential value, extrinsic customer experiential iii value, and web store utility had positive relationships with behavioral intentions. However, e-store interaction and C2C interaction did not have any relationship with extrinsic customer experiential value. Also, there was no influence found between web store utility and intrinsic customer experiential value. Pine and Gilmore's (1999) book titled " The Experience Economy " describes how businesses can turn essentially the same goods into different economic offerings using coffee as an example. Coffee beans are sold as a commodity when they are harvested for about a dollar per pound (translated as one to two cents per cup of coffee). When coffee beans are roasted, packaged, and sold at markets as a product, a cup of coffee made from the packaged coffee beans is about five to twenty-five cents. A cup of coffee bought at a convenience store comes from transforming coffee beans into a service and would be about fifty cents to a dollar. Pine and Gilmore (1999) discuss the fourth form of product offering as an experience. In the updated version of " the Experience Economy " (Pine & Gilmore, 2011), Pine and Gilmore urge business leaders to engage in creating customer experience as an economic output. Businesses sell the …