Critical Atmospheric Cues in Designing Online Stores: The Case of Amazon.com

Abstract

Online store environments have changed due to advancements in broadband speed and web development technologies. Despite the widespread real-time interactive features in online stores, social cues have been overlooked in a great number of taxonomies of online store atmospheric cues. To fill the gap, this study considers social cues with other atmospheric cues (i.e., visual, information, and navigation) in the taxonomy, and examines critical atmospheric cues that can generate a pleasure emotional response. The study also investigates whether the pleasure emotional response can lead to the approach behavior of consumers. Amazon.com, the U.S. top online pure player, is used as the specific research setting, and the results demonstrate that all atmospheric cues except visual cues can generate the pleasure emotional response. The pleasure emotional response turned out to be a significant predictor of the approach behavior.