How Website Features Affect Customer Purchase Intention to Online Artwork Sales: Original Painting & Photography

Abstract

The number of product types in e-commerce has been growing constantly since the mid-90s with the introduction of B-to-C e-commerce. Many types of products that were perceived unsuitable for online sales in the early 2000s have firmly settled as major e-commerce product categories (for example, fashion apparels, fresh groceries, and electronics) through the development of technology in e-commerce related systems. The continuous expansion of e-commerce products available online has led to customer’s increased willingness to accept new product categories on the web. Moreover, from the mid-2010s, new product categories, like artworks, jewelries, and furniture, have also become available for purchase online despite of their higher sales prices and complicated product features.

Online sales of original fine arts took off about a decade ago and established a meaningful aggregated global sales volume from 2013. As online art sales rapidly grew into a major sales channel for the art industry with promising sales projection for the coming decade, there arose a strong demand to understand customers’ search and purchase behavior toward online art sales. However, constructive studies on web-design features that influence customer’s search experience or antecedents that affect customer intention to purchase original artworks in the e-commerce environment remain scarce.

This study presents an experiment designed to investigate how web features of online art galleries affect the antecedents of purchase intention – specifically, trust, perceived risk, and perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. Website design features (product information, expert recommendation, and experience simulation) tested in the experiment were selected based on the definition of original fine arts as experience goods in the traditional search vs. experience product classification. Path modeling was used to analyze the survey data from the experiment to identify relationships between web features and artwork purchase intention via the antecedents of purchase intention. The results of the path modeling strongly suggest perceived risk and perceived usefulness as significant antecedents to the purchase intention for artworks online, while the three web features indirectly impacted perceived usefulness and perceived risk by influencing perceived ease of use and trust.

Date of Award	7 Jan 2022
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Muammer OZER (Supervisor)