Abstract

As online shopping becomes more and more omnipresent, both practitioners and consumer behavior scholars should gain more insight into online consumer behavior. A question of growing interest is how choices made online differ from those made in a traditional brick-and-mortar store (i.e., offline store). Despite in-store consumer behavior analysis in the offline world, researchers have done rather few studies on online consumer behavior from a behavioral perspective. This is unfortunate given the increasing emphasis on decision-making on the Internet and online stores, as well as amplified opportunities for experimentation and data gathering in this respect. There exist enormous opportunities in both lab and online field experimentation in consumer behavior analysis as the web may have the potential to enable behavior analysts and marketing scientists to research important behavioral contingencies related to online purchase behavior faster and with more detail compared with the traditional offline environment. Applied behavior analysis emphasizes behavior-environment relationships of social importance, mostly studied with within-subject experimental designs (Baer et al., 1987). What is most striking, though, is the lack of applied behavior analysis in digital consumer marketing.