Can avatars enhance consumer trust and emotion in online retail sales

How does the role of trust change when sales relationships and interactions move online? We propose and explore a model suggesting that at a retail website, an avatar is perceived as a social factor that influences online consumers' internal evaluations and approach behaviour. In this lab experiment, social presence and social response theories provided testable hypotheses as to whether avatars exert social influences on consumers similar to those observed with human sales personnel. Specifically, we suggest that a consumer's emotional responses and trust with the online retail will be more positive at the website with a highly likeable avatar as compared to the text-only and the low likeability avatar conditions. Fictitious travel websites were developed to test S-O-R hypotheses from our model. Results support and extend previous research showing that avatars can successfully mimic interpersonal interactions with and exert social influences on online consumers.

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