Embarrassment Products, Web Personalization and Online Buying Behavior: An Experimental Study

Abstract

An important question that online companies face today is whether their customers will use personalization services at all, given the concerns of the buyer while buying different categories of products. In this study, we argue that buying specific product categories involve embarrassment and that such products are characterized by certain emotional distress that would impact the buying behavior of consumers. We also argue that content relevant personalization may not have the same impact while buying embarrassing products as against normal products. We followed a controlled lab experiment and tested our hypotheses by analyzing click stream data such as time taken, number of clicks, and number of products added to the cart. We found that online buyers resort to reduced time to shop as a coping strategy to deal with the distress of buying embarrassing products. Our results provide evidence for customers' preference to complete the online buying process with minimum time and activities when high embarrassment products were involved, despite the provisioning of personalization. In other words, users were more concerned about their embarrassment for category of products irrespective of whether the website contents are personalized or not. These research findings would help e-commerce service providers to fine tune their web personalization and recommendation strategies.