Influence of relationship between agents’ appearance and behaviors to buying motivation in online shopping

Abstract

Applications of product recommendation virtual agents (PRVAs) for online shopping are increasing, and various studies on how to design effective PRVAs to user’s buying motivation have been done. In this paper, we try to analyze recommendation effects of PRVAs focused on the consistency between the agent’s appearances and behaviors in online shopping. First, we set up a hypothesis based on the consistency of the PRVAs’ appearances and behaviors, and prepare typical PRVA’s appearances and suitable behaviors to them. Then we conducted within-participant experiments in which the participants evaluated their buyer motivation for all combinations of the PRVAs’ appearances and the behaviors and reported their impressions on the agents. Also eye-tracking information was measured through the experiment. By investigating statistics on the participants’ buying motivations and applying statistic tests to the experimental results, our hypothesis on the consistency between the PRVAs’ appearances and the behaviors was supported. Furthermore, the experimental results of eye-tracking revealed some useful inspects on the users’ attentions.