Problem Statement
In the recent year, with the rapid development of chatbots, chat commerce becomes a new trend in e-commerce. More and more enterprises or retailers would like to develop a chatbot which can communicate with their customers.However, people aren’t familiar with chatbot and wouldn’t want to interact with it because of knowing it is a bot or thinking it isn’t smart.Therefore, it’s a key point to know which feature of chatbot would increase people’s intention to use or intention to purchase something in chatbot.
Project Goals Theory development and hypotheses Through literature reading, I find that if decrease psychological distance between customers and retailers, that would increase customers’ purchase intention. Therefore,I deduct that decreasing psychological distance between customers and chatbot would increase customers’ intention to purchase in chatbot. Media richness theory states that communication consists of a variety of cues that convey both information and help a receiver resolve ambiguity and uncertainty by providing a social, emotional, or task-related context(Otondo, 2008). Chatbot is a new communication media.Thus, we could explore media richness of chatbot to realize the communication capability of it has. Media richness consists of immediate feedback, personal focus, multiple of cues(Daft & Lengel, 1987) , the explanation are as follow: Hypotheses Gunawardena(1995)consider that immediacy could make people feel interaction with others by decreasing time of intermediary communication. This method could decrease psychological distance between human and human.Therefore,I inferred that when immediate feedback is increased, the psychological distance between human and chatbot would be decreased. Previous thesis shows that sense of humor and pleasure could decrease psychological distance between human and human in interpersonal communication,and enhance relationship(Graham, 1995). According to social presence theory, the richer the multiple information of media provides,the more socio-emotional communication would happen(Hiltz, Johnson & Turoff , 1986).Thus,I inferred that when multiple of information cues are increased, the psychological distance between human and chatbot would be decreased. Decreasing psychological distance would make people feel close to each other. Research methods
Hence,I inferred that when personal focus is increased, the psychological distance between human and chatbot would be decreased.
Ng (2013) indicated intimate emotional connections will motivate people’s intention to purchase.Therefore,I inferred that the psychological distance between human and chatbot decrease, human would feel more intimate with chatbot and the close connection would increase their purchase intention.
Many companies have begun to use chatbots as assistants for their websites, such as eBay, H&M, Macy's, etc. eBay is an online retailer that many people know, and its chatbot is placed on Facebook Messenger, which is easier for users to reach and has variety of products online. Thus, this study chose eBay ShopBot as a bot for experiencing.
I use SPSS 24.0 to analysis respondents’ basic information and the descriptive statistics of chatbots’ user experience and use SmartPLS 3.2.7 to conduct confirmatory factor analysis to make sure those measurements are valid in my thesis. Through path analysis and path coefficient, we could determine the correlation and influence between independent variable and dependent variable in my research model.
Research findings
This empirical study conducted a questionnaire survey of the users who have experienced the eBay ShopBot. In total, 380 questionnaires were obtained. 43 questionnaires were determined as invalid ,leaving 337 valid responses. The following tables are participant’s background and path coefficient:
Participant background
From the table, the respondents from 21~30 years old at most ,there are 225 people,accounting for 66.8% of the total.
According to education proportion, the most one is college accounting for 62% of the total
In this research, students takes most part accounting for 68.2% of the total.
Regarding whether the participant has used chatbot, this study demonstrated 174 people have experience using chat bots, accounting for 51.6% of the total, more than half of participants have the experience.
Path coefficient
Through our path cofficient, immediacy feedback,personal focus ,multiple of information cues of chatbot have significant negative impact on psychological distance. Psychological distance has significant negative effect on purchase intention. Thus,H1~H4 are all supported.
According to our findings, there are three important attributes of chatbot that make user feel more closer to chatbot and feel more comfortable using it:
When user feel closer with chatbot , they would like to purchase things in chatbot.When user feel closer with chatbot , they would like to purchase things in chatbot.Thus,enterprises who want to develop chatbots should consider immediate feedback,personality of chatbot and a variety of method to interact with human.They could also pay more attention on which features could decrease distance of human feel and increase their desire of purchasing.
Ｗay forward
The participants of this research consists of students so it couldn’t present normal public’s opinion. Also, my research method is online questionnaire,so I only could measure people’s perspective of using eBay ShopBot.I suggest that we could invite different age groups to participate questionnaire and conduct interview to realize more different ideas when they use chatbot.