To persuade, or not to persuade: An experimental case study of e-commerce consumer responses to persuasive messages
Abstract: One of the biggest challenges e-commerce face today is how to encourage website visitors to act. The purpose of this thesis was to explore whether persuasion strategies had the potential to get website visitors to act by bridging the gap between attitudes (i.e. what people think) and behaviors (i.e. what people do) in the context of sustainable e-commerce. In addition, the study investigated whether exposure to persuasion stimuli generated the same attitudes and intentions as identified in prior research. Persuasion strategies based on Cialdini's principles of authority, commitment & consistency, and social proof have been applied through environmentally imbued pop-up messages on the website of the case company Sellpy, a Swedish e-commerce platform for second-hand goods. When statistically analyzing purchase data, no significant behavioral effects were seen after treatment, indicating that the tested persuasion stimuli could not bridge the gap between attitudes and behavior. Nonetheless, persuasion stimuli generated high attitudes towards the ad and purchase intentions after analyzing completive surveys, confirming the discrepancy between e-commerce consumers intentional and behavioral responses. In addition, brand attitude was found to mediate the effect of ad attitude on purchase intention, which is in line with existing research.
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