Adventure versus gratification: Emotional shopping in online auctions

Purpose: Online auctions have attracted emotional shoppers through exciting shopping processes such as searching and bidding. The recreational and emotional worth of online auction shopping forces auction retailers to develop tailored strategies for their consumers. To this end, this study aimed to classify online auction shoppers based on their emotional shopping motivations and examine the relations of demographics (i.e. age, gender, income, and education) and psychographics (i.e. impulsiveness, variety-seeking tendency, price sensitivity, and risk-consciousness) to online auction shopper groups. Design/methodology/approach: The data were collected via an online questionnaire utilizing a pre-recruited consumer panel that had experience of online auction shopping during the past 12 months. Existing measurement scales were adopted and tested for validity and reliability in the processes of academic expert review, expert debriefing, the pretest, and the main study. The measures consisted of consumer psychographics (i.e. impulsiveness, variety seeking, price consciousness, and risk consciousness), emotional shopping motivations (i.e. adventure and gratification), and demographic variables. The analyses of the study proceeded in two stages. First, a cluster analysis uncovered auction shopper segments that emerged from the two dimensions of emotional shopping motivation. Second, regression analyses determined the predictive powers of demographic and psychographic variables in discriminating auction shopper segments. Findings: The findings suggested that there were distinct auction shopper segments based on adventure and gratification shopping motivations. Four cluster groups showed significant differences in demographic characteristics of age and gender, and psychographic characteristics of impulsiveness, variety-seeking tendency, and price sensitivity. The regression results provided information on predictive powers of selected variables (i.e. age, gender, impulsiveness, variety-seeking tendency, price sensitivity, and risk consciousness) for different segments. Originality/value: This study identified four online auction shopper segments and their differences in demographic and psychographic characteristics.