OBJECTIVE The purpose of the study was to evaluate the accessibility of, and advice provided by, sexual health and advice services for young people in Croydon, UK using a 'mystery shopper' approach. METHODS Nineteen young people aged 13-21 years were trained as mystery shoppers. The group developed a set of standards, based in part on existing guidelines of best practice, that should be met w...

Research demonstrates that food desert environments limit low-income shoppers' ability to purchase healthy foods, thereby increasing their likelihood of diet-related illnesses. We sought to understand how individuals in an urban American food desert make grocery-purchasing decisions, and specifically why unhealthy purchases arise. Analysis is based on ethnographic data from participant observat...

Most search engines do their text query and retrieval using keywords. However, vendors cannot anticipate all possible ways in which shoppers search for their products. In fact, many times, there may be no direct keyword match between a search phrase and descriptions of products that are perfect hits for the search. A highly automated solution to the problem of bridging the semantic gap between ...

The purpose of this paper was to examine the critical factors that affect consumer trust in online shopping environment in Taiwan. Based on the implications derived from the previous literature review, the factors affecting online trust are presented, which provide a basis for the further development model of trust in this study. The study suggests that if there are more perceived trust in onli...

Nowadays, online clothes-selling business has become popular and extremely attractive because of its convenience and cheap-and-fine price. Good examples of these successful Web sites include Yintai.com, Vancl.com and Shop.vipshop.com which provide thousands of clothes for online shoppers. The challenge for online shoppers lies on how to find a good product from lots of options. In this article,...

The focus of this study is to explore the antecedents of online repurchase intention (RI) of university students in Malaysia. The aim of this study is to examine online RI, specifically to examine the impact of prepurchase user perceptions of attributes, pre-purchase user attitudes and postpurchase user attitudes on RI. This study managed to collect 318 completed online questionnaires from inte...

The phenomenal growth of the fairtrade industry has attracted increased research interest but little is known as to what marketing factors drive fairtrade retail sales. This gap has profound implications for fairtrade marketing research and the future of the fairtrade industry. To provide a more robust and objective insight this paper draws on the analysis of supermarket loyalty card dataset of...

We model competition between two firms selling identical goods to customers who arrive in the market stochastically. Shoppers choose where to purchase based upon both price and the time cost associated with waiting for service. One seller provides two separate queues, each with its own server, while the other seller has a single queue and server. We explore the market impact of the multi-server...

The design of the Affordable Care Act's online health insurance Marketplaces can improve how consumers make complex health plan choices. We examined the choice environment on the state-based Marketplaces and HealthCare.gov in the third open enrollment period. Compared to previous enrollment periods, we found greater adoption of some decision support tools, such as total cost estimators and inte...

Previous research investigating what information shoppers seek when purchasing groceries has used either lab-experiments or observed shoppers in supermarkets. The present research investigates this question in a relatively naturalistic online-grocery environment. Forty participants completed their weekly shopping online while their eye-movements were recorded. Ten of the participants were subse...