Thursday, June 29, 2017 | 2:00pm-3:30pm | Room 335, HSBC Business School Building

Abstract

Usually two types of displaying advertisements have been applied to remind people of an e-commerce website, the display of the website itself or that of pictures of products people have browsed at the website during their previous visit. It is apparent that these two different types of display may attract customers with different intensions. They may have very different information needs and seek different support from the website. The understanding about the onsite behavioral difference between those two types of visitors, as well as that between people who have purchased during the visit and those who have not, along with how those differences are related to the onsite behavior of the next visit to the website, plays an important role to the design of e-commerce website and to the strategic planning of advertising budget. However, we have not yet found IS studies that provide guidance in this area, even though practitioners request answers in this field. This study thus proposes to investigate the behavioral characteristics of visitors attracted to an ecommerce website by different types of displaying ads.. Based on the theory of purchase funnel, we developed hypotheses that depict how visitors will behave when they arrive at an e-commerce website. The hypotheses were tested by using the web log from an e-commerce website of one of the largest retailor stores in China.