The relative importance of sensory and non -sensory attributes in physical and online stores: An evaluability perspective

This research investigates the effects of consumers' shopping environments on their decisions. It is widely acknowledged that these days consumers use both, brick and mortar (visits to physical stores) as well as click and browse (visits to websites) methods while making most purchases.;I draw on the Evaluability Hypothesis (Hsee 1996) to show that consumers' product evaluations based on attributes and their product choices vary depending on the attribute type and the shopping medium i.e. internet or physical store. The basic idea of my research flows like this: The internet facilitates judging of non-sensory attributes (e.g. price) of products and limits one's ability to judge the sensory attributes (e.g. material feel). So, when the consumers make their choices in online environments they will experience greater difficulty in evaluating the sensory attributes and hence those attributes will be discounted in the product evaluations and choices. A series of three empirical studies support these main effects for a variety of products.;The first experiment shows that evaluations of sensory attributes in internet environment were systematically lower than those in physical environment. However, such differences were not found for non-sensory attributes. The second experiment demonstrates that the likelihood of consumers choosing products superior on sensory attributes is higher in physical stores as compared to in internet stores. Finally, the results of the third experiment support the mediating role of attribute evaluability in explicating the main effects of shopping medium on choice. Moreover, the third experiment also rules out need for touch as an alternate explanation strengthening the support for evaluability explanation.;Thus, this research indicates that consumers may not appreciate a product's superiority on sensory attributes while making the evaluations on internet but the same product could get much favorable evaluations in the physical stores.