Abstract

A large body of research has been devoted to uncovering the drivers of consumers’ mobile shopping intention.  However, recent work has begun to suggest that behavioral intention does not necessarily translate into actual purchase behavior – a concept known as the “intention-behavior gap”.  This study applies an extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology framework to review determinants of intention to purchase in the context of mobile commerce, and then empirically verifies whether these antecedents influence actual purchase behavior.  A survey was distributed to participants who have engaged in mobile shopping in the past, gauging their perceptions regarding various factors (performance expectancy, effort expectancy, image, facilitating conditions, price value, hedonic motivation, trust) and recording the total dollar amount that they have spent when mobile shopping in the last six months.  Confirmatory factor analysis was then conducted to produce factors that were used as explanatory variables in an ordinal logit regression model.  We find that although a variety of factors appear to influence consumers’ mobile shopping intention, most of them do not appear to influence actual purchase behavior.  This finding, along with many others in the same vein, raises the question of whether researchers should continue to model purchase intentions and rather focus more on exhibited behaviors.  We discover the only factor which affects actual purchase behavior, in the context of mobile shopping, is consumers’ perceived trust in the vendor/mobile channel.  This barrier is consistent across gender, experience, and accessibility levels.  Managers should be aware that trust continues to be a strong consumer issue which inhibits customers’ propensity to spend more when mobile shopping.

Citation

Bahmani, N and Bhatnagar, A (2023), "Antecedents of consumers’ mobile shopping expenditures and the intention-behavior gap", Journal of Empirical Generalisations in Marketing Science, Vol. 23, No. 3

Keywords

intention-behavior gap, mobile shopping, Technology acceptance model, trust., Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology