Article Preview
TopIntroduction
Understanding consumer behavior plays a crucial role in all kinds of business fields. Since shopping and purchasing have shifted from physical “brick-and-mortar” stores to online environments in recent years, it is important to further understand the motives, habits, and expectations of online shoppers. Despite some similarities between online shopping and traditional offline shopping in physical environments, the motives for online shopping can be fundamentally different (Ganesh, 2010).
The purpose of this study is to increase the understanding of online shopping behavior by analyzing consumer narratives describing their online shopping experiences and purchase paths from initial need recognition to post-purchase activities. The study brings together relevant consumer behavior literature from marketing and information systems (IS) studies to examine the antecedents of online shopping and their effects on consumers’ online shopping preferences. Based on the theoretical antecedents of online shopping, ideal types (Weber, 1904a, 1904b) of online shoppers are identified.
An ideal type is an analytical construct originally presented by sociologist Max Weber. It can be defined as an entity created by a researcher, with which s/he aims to first understand and then describe a multifaceted social action or phenomenon. Ideal types are internally fully coherent constructions representing reality but not found in reality as they are presented. As such, they are abstractions of reality (Giddens & Sutton, 2009; Weber, 1904a, 1904b). Ideal types either fit or deviate from a given situation of the reality and thus cannot be understood as being empirically right or wrong. According to Weber, ideal types have a twofold function: serving as a measurement tool for reality and to contrast the created ideal types with the empirically observed phenomenon. This enables identifying the regularities and causalities within the observed phenomenon or the observed social system. According to Kaesler (2003), these regularities and causalities can be further utilized in understanding and explaining the social system with a higher level of abstraction.
The purpose of forming ideal types is to reduce the complexity of the social reality by making it easier to understand in an analytical way and to differentiate and highlight the most essential aspects of a social phenomenon (Weber, 1988). Contemplating and applying Weberian ideal types has enabled the use of fictional people in the design process and had a strong impact on designing technologies and products. From a research perspective, the concept of ideal type has been previously used, for example, in relation to consumers of sport and wellness products (Kettunen et al., 2017) and services and tourism (cf., Ahtiainen, Piirainen, & Vehmas, 2015). Although the ideal type approach can be considered as a suitable method for investigating and describing online shopping behavior as well, it has been unused in the context of online shopping.