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Rethinking mobile interactivity in online shopping

Consumers are shopping on their phones more than ever, with new mobile commerce features rolling out seemingly every day. But scholarship has yet to distinguish mobile interactivity (m-interactivity) from desktop interactivity (e-interactivity), leaving gaps in our understanding of how shopping via smartphone leads to business success.

Yun Jung Lee, Ph.D., associate professor of marketing at ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ, decided to build a new conceptual framework for m-interactivity, which she unveiled in “The Dimensions of M-Interactivity and Their Impacts in the Mobile Commerce Context,” an article in the 2017 International Journal of Electronic Commerce, co-authored with Sujin Yang, Ph.D., assistant professor of consumer science at Sungshin Women’s University in South Korea. In the article, she and Dr. Yang identify four key dimensions of m-interactivity—two-way communication, responsiveness, synchronicity and ubiquity—and chart their influence on enjoyment, satisfaction and loyalty among South Korean consumers.

When Dr. Lee and Dr. Yang measured the four dimensions of m-interactivity against consumer response variables, they found that ubiquity (“access to information or mobile internet service at the point of need regardless of [location]”) was the only dimension with “positive direct effects” on all variables.

This was not a surprising discovery, Dr. Lee reports, since consumers “technically live with their mobile internet connection 24/7″ and South Korea has the highest 4G LTE penetration in the world. What did surprise her was the negative correlation between two-way communication and consumer enjoyment and satisfaction, likely because consumers only communicate with a company’s service representatives when they are unsatisfied to begin with.

Dr. Lee offers mobile commerce sites several suggestions based on the study’s results. First, they “should provide a tool that consumers can use to communicate with each other easily,” she said, citing the importance of interpersonal communication among mobile users. And to take their company’s services to the next level, “mobile commerce website managers [should] examine which interactivity features their customers specifically prefer when communicating with other customers.

Yun Jung Lee, Ph.D., has published widely on topics relating to marketing. An associate professor of marketing at ÌÇÐÄÆƽâ°æ, she received her undergraduate and master’s degrees at Seoul National University in South Korea and her Ph.D. in Consumer Behavior from Purdue University.