Searching for Experience on the Web: An Empirical Examination of Consumer Behavior for Search and Experience Goods

Abstract

By lowering the costs of gathering and sharing information and offering new ways to learn about products before purchase, the Internet reduces traditional distinctions between search and experience goods. At the same time, differences in the type of information sought for search and experience goods can precipitate differences in the process through which consumers gather information and make decisions online. A preliminary experiment shows that though there are significant differences in consumers' perceived ability to evaluate product quality before purchase between search and experience goods in traditional retail environments, these differences are blurred in online environments. An analysis of the online behavior of a representative sample of U.S. consumers shows that consumers spend similar amounts of time online gathering information for both search and experience goods, but there are important differences in the browsing and purchase behavior of consumers for these two types of goods. In particular, experience goods involve greater depth (time per page) and lower breadth (total number of pages) of search than search goods. In addition, free riding (purchasing from a retailer other than the primary source of product information) is less frequent for experience than for search goods. Finally, the presence of product reviews from other consumers and multimedia that enable consumers to interact with products before purchase has a greater effect on consumer search and purchase behavior for experience than for search goods. Building on this idea, Nelson (1970Nelson ( , 1974 classifies products into search and experience goods according to consumers' ability to obtain product quality information before purchase. Nelson argues that consumers conduct minimal prepurchase information search for experience goods but perform extensive search for search goods. However, several authors (e.g., Alba et al. 1997;Klein 1998;Peterson, Balasubramanian, and Bronnenberg 1997) have suggested that because the Internet enables consumers to learn from the experiences of others and to gather product information that is often difficult to obtain in offline settings (Klein 1998;Lynch and Ariely 2000), it makes all attributes searchable and erases differences between search and experience goods.An alternative perspective on information search is provided by research on how consumers acquire and process information to make decisions (Bettman et al. 1993;Ha and Hoch 1989;Lurie 2004;Lynch and Ariely 2000;Shugan 1980). This research shows that different types of information are associated with different cognitive processes that affect the way information is acquired, the amount of information acquired, and the time spent processing each piece of information (Johnson, Bellman, and Lohse 2003;Johnson and Payne 1985;Payne, Bettman, and Johnson 1988). If consumers seek different information for search and experience goods, this perspective implies that online search and purchase behavior may be different for these two types of goods.This art...

Investigating the Persuasiveness of E-Commerce Product Pages within a Rhetorical Perspective

“…For example, Girard, Silverblatt, and Korgaonkar (2002) found that consumers have greater willingness to shop from an Internet retailer for search products than experience products; Girard and Dion (2010) validated the product classification framework online and confirmed that the risk of experience goods is significantly higher than that of search goods; Huang, Lurie, and Mitra (2009) found that consumers view fewer pages but spend more time per page before purchasing experience goods than search goods.…”

Consumption and Hedonic Experience: Tourist Destination of Fernando de Noronha, PE, Brazil

“…Neste sentido, Huang et al (2009), ao avaliar as comunidades virtuais na visão do marketing, pode concluir que elas possibilitam aos clientes aprenderem com as experiências de outras pessoas e conseguirem dados sobre produtos e vivências. Apesar de comunidade virtual indicar que estas são menos reais que as comunidades tradicionais, para os grupos sociais envolvidos, elas têm presença real e influenciam no comportamento e no consumo de seus …”

Flexible Query Answering Systems 2015

“…In mobile e-commerce, potential consumers search for product information before making purchasing decisions due to the overwhelming information [8,12,16]. Since search could reflect consumers' purchase intentions and affect their choices online [9], it is worthy of deep exploration and has attracted a lot of interest from both academia and practitioners.…”

“…In marketing practice, clickstream data are commonly used to quantify the customers' search behaviors [8,9,16]. Usually, the clickstream data provide information about the sequence of pages or the path viewed by the consumers as they navigate websites [18].…”