Understanding consumer online shopping behaviour from the perspective of transaction costs

 et al.
2002, Foucault and Scheufele 2002, Brown
 et al.
2003, Park 
and Jun 2003, Cho 2004, Moe and Fader 2004, Pires
 et al.
2004, Yang and Lester 2004, Lee 
and Lin 2005) and the lower likelihood of them aborting an intended online transaction (Cho 
2004). These results are also confirmed by the extended TAM which suggests that increased 
user experience had positive effect on users’ attitudes toward technology and the mastering of 
that technology (Venkatesh and Morris 2000).
 
Previous studies consider emotions as an important element in human response to 
environmental settings and as a guide to behaviour (Mazaheri
 et al.
2011). According to 
Mehrabian and Russell (1974), consumer emotions lead to various consumer response 
behaviours such as purchase intention (Ha and Lennon 2010) and approach behaviours 
(Menon and Kahn 2002, Eroglu
 et al.
2003b). In online settings, several attempts have been 
made to examine the influence of emotion on online consumer behaviour (Lynch and Beck 
2001, Lynch
 et al.
2001, Wolfinbarger and Gilly 2001, Xia 2002, Huang 2003, Wu
 et al.
2008, Kim and Lennon 2010, Verhagen and van Dolen 2011, La and Choi 2012, Kim and 
Lennon 2013). For example, Kim and Lennon (2013) demonstrated that emotion has a 

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significant impact on online purchase intention. Wolfinbarger and Gilly (2001) and Xia (2002)
maintained that emotions are related to consumers’ interpretation of their feelings given 
different online purposes. Positive affect would lead to shorter browsing time and less 
detailed information processing when the purpose of online shopping is task-oriented rather 
than pure entertainment, whereas negative affect works in an opposite way (Lynch and Beck 
2001, Xia 2002, Huang 2003). Lynch et al. (2001) investigated the effect of emotions on 
purchasing intention and loyalty of consumers from 12 countries in three regions (North 
America, Western Europe, and South America) and pointed out that the influence of emotion 
in online shopping could vary with product categories and consumer experiences. The results 
further showed that positive emotions have a positive influence on online shopping intention 
of consumers in Western Europe and South America, but not on consumers in North America. 
From a product perspective, low-touch, standardized goods may be less subject to the 
influence of the positive affect from the shopping experience than high-touch, experiential 
products (Lynch
 et al.
2001).
In recent years, a large and growing body of literature has investigated the role of flow in 
determining shopping intention and usage. Flow has been linked with different types of 
consumer activities where the individual becomes so engrossed with the activity as to create a 
pleasurable experience (Hsu
 et al.
2012, Wang and Hsiao 2012). As Csikszentmihalyi (1975) 
defined, flow is a cognitive state in which individuals are so intensely involved in an activity 
that “nothing else seems to matter”. Hoffman and Novak (1996) suggested that flow could be 
used to model online consumer behaviour. A great number of studies have reported that flow 
experiences entice behavioural intentions such as an increase in the likelihood of purchasing 
from a website, longer visitation at a website (known as stickiness), revisiting the website in 
the future, positive word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations to others (Novak
 et al.
2000, 

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Korzaan 2003, Mathwick and Rigdon 2004, Skadberg and Kimmel 2004, Richard and 
Chandra 2005, Skadberg