Influence of Personality, Shopper type and Social Support on the Consumers’ Need for Status and Continuance Intention in E-commerce

With the increase in the number of companies doing business online, simply selling their products online will not help an e-business make new clients and maintain existing ones. Businesses have to implement strategies that will make their business attractive to new clients while maintaining existing customers. The use of personalization has been suggested as an e-commerce strategy that businesses can use to attract and retain clients. To contribute to ongoing research in this area, we explore the use of personality, shopper type, social support and need for status in e-commerce personalization and their influence on the continuance intention of e-commerce shoppers. Using a sample size of 226 e-commerce shoppers, we develop and test a global research model using partial least-squares structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) analysis. In addition, we carried out multi-group analysis between males and females to determine if there are any significant differences between both groups. Our results show that personality, shopper type, social support and need for status explain almost 60% of the variance in the continuance intention of consumers to shop online. In addition, shopper type has the strongest effect on continuance intention compared to personality, need for status and social support. Furthermore, the personality of males significantly influenced their continuance intention of shopping online, while this was insignificant for females. These findings suggest possible design guidelines in developing personalized e-commerce shopping experience for consumers.