Store selection criteria and sales prediction in virtual worlds

Abstract

Virtual worlds (VWs) have emerged as a new context for gaming, collaboration, social networking but also commercial activity. This paper focuses on the latter, and investigates how consumers behave in this virtual context when selecting stores they visit or buy from. The paper explores store selection criteria in virtual world stores and extends earlier research in both offline and online commercial environments, taking into account the novel IT capabilities that VWs exploit. Theoretical insights drawn from the marketing and information systems literature have been used to guide the design of a survey conducted in the virtual world Second Life. In addition to identifying the factors influencing store selection, the paper investigates how these differ between shoppers and non-shoppers, and identifies the factors that affect the amount of money spent in virtual world shopping environments. The findings suggest that ''Core Store Features'' and ''Security and Privacy'' constitute the most important store selection factors in virtual environments and that sales in VWs are predicted by the frequency of visiting and the time spent within VWs' stores. Virtual world dynamics and motivation for the studyA Virtual World (VW) is defined as a "computer-simulated three-dimensional (3D) environment" [11, p.525]. Virtual Worlds have been developed since the last decade, exploiting the available information and Internet technology capabilities, attracting increasing numbers of users. Some of these worlds can be accessed through a web browser, while others require downloading and using specialized software. The origin of VWs is considered to be both social networking and gaming [52]. Some VWs started as games and consequently adopted new services, capabilities and even their own virtual currency. The variety of activities and possibilities depends on each VW's orientation (e.g., education, socialization, entertainment, commerce, etc). Several VWs develop and grow dynamically through their inhabitants' (i.e., users') actions.Users in a VW interact [45] with others through their "avatar", "a representation of the user as an animated character in virtual worlds" [47, p.17], and engage in numerous activities such as information sharing, talking with friends or finding new friends, playing games, creating new services, building virtual objects, buying and selling goods, and so on. They can communicate with others through synchronous text messages, voice chat, e-mails, or videoconferencing.Retailing activity also gained momentum in VWs, with users buying and selling virtual or real products [34]. Recent studies suggest that Virtual Commerce (V-Commerce) should be considered as a totally new and well promising retailing channel [27,28,78]. According to Kzero [41], the revenues in VWs reached $6 billion in 2012 and by 2018, VWs will have been one of the most important business platforms [35]. The overall consumer virtual reality market over the five year period of 2014 to 2018 will worth $16.2 bn, with an average compound ann...

The study of the antecedents of knowledge sharing behavior

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Understanding the use of Virtual Reality in Marketing: A text mining-based review

“…Data are treated using statistics like t-student test, ANOVA, ANCOVA or multiple regressions (e.g. Krasonikolakis et al, 2014;Waterlander et al, 2015;Yeh et al, 2017;Dad et al, 2018). More recently, researchers have started to use structural equations and the sample size tends to rise, ranging between 300 and 400 (e.g., Krasonikolakis et al, 2018).…”

“…Milgram et al (1994, p. 283) propose a taxonomy to differentiate the technologies available for experiencing combinations of reality and virtuality and describe VR as the environment "in which the participantobserver is totally immersed in a completely synthetic world, which may or may not mimic the properties of a real-world environment". From the applications of VR envisaged by Brooks in the 1990s (1999 as a vehicle for simulation and entertainment, the range of acceptance and use of VR has enlarged considerably and now includes, for example, tourism (e.g., Abergel et al, 2016;Jeng et al, 2017;Yeh et al, 2017), retailing (e.g., Evans & Wurster 1999;Krasonikolakis et al, 2014) and medical and educational issues (e.g., Abboudi et al, 2012;Abboudi et al, 2013).…”

“…Several studies show that the product/brand stimuli can come from consumers´ experiences in virtual reality (e.g., Verhagen et al, 2014;Bigné et al, 2016;Yeh et al, 2017) with concepts such as attachment, engagement and identity being induced by virtual objects (e.g., Koles & Nagy, 2012;Nagy & Koles, 2014;Grewal, Roggeveen & Nordfalt, 2017), as well as purchase behaviours (Krasonikolakis et al, 2014). Thus, studies on this field tend to apply the S(stimuli)-O(organism)-R(response) framework (Eroglu, Machleit & Davis, 2003;Roschk, Loureiro & Breitsohl, 2017).…”

“…In such cases, an immersive simulated reality, such as those allowed by Virtual Reality (VR) technologies, has played an important role in engaging consumers in new and exciting experiences. VR has been used successfully in various fields of study such as architectural planning (Schnabel et al, 2001;Dorta & Pérez 2006), rehabilitation medicine and health (Gourlay et al, 2000;Rizzo et al, 2011), military applications (Manojlovich et al, 2003), industrial applications (Wang & Li, 2004) and commerce (Krasonikolakis et al, 2014;van Herpen et al, 2016), among others.…”