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Because the Internet is a popular shopping medium for consumers worldwide (Chen et al., 2013), retailers are increasingly shifting the focus of their business online. The Internet is thus continually transforming the retail sector (Blázquez, 2014). The number of online stores has grown considerably in the previous few years and the retail environment is increasingly competitive. Ensuring repeated visits from online shoppers and building store loyalty are some of the crucial challenges for online retailers. Consumers’ perceived value plays a dominant role in the adoption of technology (Yang et al., 2012) and has received substantial attention in the marketing literature (Iniesta-Bonillo et al., 2012) because consumers’ value judgments affect their satisfaction, preference, and loyalty levels (Overby and Lee, 2006). Therefore, online store managers have responded to these challenges by creating value in their online store.
Studies have considered two types of consumers’ perceived value in an online shopping environment: utilitarian and hedonic value (Blázquez, 2014). Perceived utilitarian value is related to consumers’ overall assessment of a purchase—whether it fulfils their needs from a functional perspective—and perceived hedonic value is related to a product’s entertainment-related and emotional benefits (Chang and Tseng, 2013). One study emphasized that online vendors should consider whether their website provides adequate utilitarian and hedonic value to consumers during the website’s development (Chiu et al., 2009). Many studies have confirmed that perceived utilitarian and hedonic value affects consumers’ online shopping satisfaction (Yang and Wu, 2009), attitude toward a website (Chiagouris and Ray, 2010), preference (Overby and Lee, 2006), loyalty (Hung et al., 2010; Chen et al., 2013), online repurchase intention (Chang and Tseng, 2013), mobile Internet use intention (Yang et al., 2012), and Web 2.0 contribution behavior (Hung et al., 2010).
Several studies on online consumers have further explored the antecedent variables of utilitarian and hedonic value because of their demonstrated importance. Studies have revealed that consumers’ perceived utilitarian and hedonic value was affected by an e-store’s image (Chang and Tseng, 2013), the environmental attributes of the website (Charfi and Lombardot, 2015), e-service quality (Chen et al., 2013), novelty, flow, efficiency, and complementarities (Hung et al., 2010). In addition, recent research has investigated the effects of website quality dimensions (i.e., information, system, and service) on consumer-perceived utilitarian and hedonic value; the results revealed that system and service quality affected utilitarian shopping value, whereas information and service quality affected hedonic shopping value (Kim et al., 2012). The limitations of the study were that exogenous variables accounted for only 20.2% of the variance in hedonic value and 21.6% of the variance in utilitarian value; consequently, the authors suggested that other factors might have also affected the consumers’ perceptions of hedonic and utilitarian value. A clearer explanation of consumers’ perceptions can be provided by an integrated model that combines different perspectives than a model with a single perspective (Shih and Chen, 2013).