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Top1. Introduction
The use of interactive systems is an important issue for online organizations, which attempt to offer to their customers an increasing number of information to cover their needs, and help them identify their product preferences. Consequently, it is of high interest to better understand these systems, their effectiveness and requirements (Xu et al., 2014). Personalised services, through their recommendations, may help users to cope with the overwhelming plethora of information, sometimes at the expense of privacy, since profiling is based on personal and private information. Accordingly, specific strategies are needed to deliver personal messages and targeted information to different users (Lee & Cranage, 2011). Users may benefit from personalised services, since they offer convenience, efficiency and individualization. Personalisation is increasingly included in various services and offering personalised information may affect customers’ perceptions towards online shopping and increase their loyalty (Zhou et al., 2014). Building on loyalty and on the value of the relationship between customers and firms may lead to more successful personalised services or products, as it helps understand customers’ needs (Namvar & Khalilzadeh, 2013). The majority of the studies in personalised e-commerce focus on the cognitive factors that influence customers’ behaviour (e.g., Ho & Bodoff, 2014). Nonetheless, the important role of affective factors and emotions in the area needs further investigation (Pappas et al., 2014a; Pappas et al., 2016a).
Affective factors are important determinants of user behaviour and may be induced by interactive technologies, such as personalised services (Hsieh et al., 2014). For example, the use of SMS advertising may influence customers’ attitudes (Dharmadasa et al., 2014). Further, Individuals experience different emotions during online shopping, which affect their behaviour, and previous studies have examined the important role of emotions in online shopping (Kuo &Wu, 2012; Penz &Hogg, 2011). Positive emotions have been found to increase customers’ satisfaction with an online vendor along with their purchase intentions, as opposed to negative emotions, which have a negative effect. However, these effects have not been verified by all studies (Pappas et al., 2014a; Chea &Luo, 2008), suggesting that a different approach on emotions is needed.
This study examines the role emotions in online shopping based on personalised services and provides evidence on how a change in their intensity influences customers’ intention to purchase. Offering personalised information in online shopping is frequent the past few years, mostly by the implementation of personalised services (Xu et al., 2014), however the role of emotions on shopping behaviour when individuals receive and process personalised information needs further investigation. Extant research has proved the importance of incorporating emotions in personalised services (Pappas et al., 2014a; 2016a), and emphasizes on the influence of affective factors on purchase behaviour (Koo and Ju, 2010; Verhagen &Dolen, 2011). Nonetheless, this studies treat emotions unidimensionally and they only examine particular emotional valence or control. The two main types of emotions (i.e., positive and negative emotions) are correlated (Chang et al., 2014) and are likely to exist simultaneously in customers (Pappas et al., 2014a; 2016a). However, the effect of different levels of emotion on intention to purchase when using personalised services remains largely understudied.