Article 2 Differentiating online shoppers

Question 1

What is being studied?

Answer 1

The different types of customers visiting an online store and their characteristics and buying behaviour.

(directed vs. exploratory)
(future vs. immediate).

Question 2

Why is this important to study?

Answer 2

Because classification of different types of customers allows a company to provide the best stimuli in order to get them to buy.

Question 3

How and where is this research conducted?

Answer 3

Clickstream data (page-to-page information) was gathered from an e-commerce site selling nutrition products.

A cluster analysis was applied (using variety measures, session levels, and before-transaction measures) to identify the different types of sessions.

Question 4

What are the main findings?

Answer 4

• Four types of shopping strategies are found, and “shallow sessions”.
  (Directed buying, hedonic browsing, search/deliberation, and knowledge-building).
• Conversion is highest in the directed-buying phase.
• In the buying phase, a fixed device is most popular.

Question 5

What are the limitations?

Answer 5

• Most click-stream data is collected and recorded as long, meaningless URLs.
• In this case, a heterogeneous company was used. The results, however, could be completely different if the homogeneous company market was also included in the research.