How does price variance among purchase channels affect consumers' cognitive process when shopping online?

Area of Science:

• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Consumer Behavior
• E-commerce

Background:

• The online shopping market is rapidly expanding, leading to intense competition among e-commerce channels.
• Understanding consumer cognitive processes in response to price variations across channels is crucial for businesses.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how price variance between different online sales channels affects consumer cognitive processes.
• To identify electroencephalogram (EEG) markers associated with price variance perception in e-commerce.

Main Methods:

• Utilized event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure brain activity in 30 participants.
• Presented participants with daily necessities exhibiting low or high price variance between self-operated and third-party seller channels on an e-commerce platform.
• Collected electroencephalogram (EEG) data during the experimental tasks.

Main Results:

• Small price variances between channels were associated with an intensification of the N2 component in ERPs.
• Large price variances between channels were linked to a diminution of the P3 component in ERPs.
• N2 component may indicate price variance identification and response inhibition, while P3 may reflect attention allocation due to task difficulty.

Conclusions:

• Changes in ERP components N2 and P3 can serve as cognitive indices for evaluating customer identification and attention distribution.
• These findings offer insights into how consumers cognitively process price variances in online shopping environments.
• The study highlights the utility of neurophysiological measures in understanding e-commerce consumer behavior.