The impact of retailer web design on purchase intention

: a study between Continente and Pingo Doce

Abstract

The world has been changing and consequently the behaviour of consumers and companies. Due to the increase of online sales and the urgent need to adapt to the electronic reality, all sectors are forced to re¬invented and create new strategies to be successful not only in their offline stores but also in the online market. With this, it is necessary to apply efforts on websites and understand the perception of consumer behaviour. In this sense, this study focuses on the online grocery sector using two Portuguese supermarket websites for analysis. This study aims to study the impact of web design on consumer purchase intention, mediating the effect of user experience. More precisely, this research analyses how distinct layouts of the same website can influence differently online consumer attitudes. Also, understand how the pragmatic and hedonic aspects impacts the user experience of online consumers. For this, a questionnaire was conducted where the respondents were exposed to 4 stimuli, 2 images of real sites and other two images with the sites re¬designed according to the improvements taken from the focus group and the literature. The results obtained show that web design positively impacts intention to purchase, UX mediates the relationship between Web Layout and Purchase Intention, having pragmatic aspect a stronger effect than hedonic one.

Date of Award	5 May 2023
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Paulo Romeiro (Supervisor)