How Interactivity Works for Utilitarian and Hedonic Consumers Online

Interactivity has been deemed as one of the prominent feature of the Internet for online consumers to seek product information. This study examined how the three dimensions of interactivity (control, direction of communication, and synchronicity) affect the users' online information seeking process, respectively. Moreover, we also assess how users' purpose (utilitarian vs. hedonic) moderates the effects of interactivity. This study employed the experimental method to test the proposed hypotheses. This study recruited 292 respondents in total to participate in this study. The empirical results revealed that all of the three dimensions of interactivity significantly increased consumers' perceived interactivity and involvement, which further mediates the effects onto user satisfaction of the website and intended to revisit and recommend the website. Furthermore, web-surfing purpose moderated the relation between physical interactivity and perceived interactivity as well as the relation between perceived interactivity and involvement. The findings of this study provide online practitioners useful suggestions regarding personalization strategies of using the most prominent feature of the Internet, namely, interactivity.