Effortless online shopping? How online shopping contexts prime heuristic processing

Online shopping is often motivated by the opportunity to save resources due to its high convenience and accessibility. We thus propose that online-shopping contexts can prime low effort processing, which increase heuristic decisions, when compared with offline contexts. Four experimental studies test this hypothesis. Study 1 shows that consumers expect to spend fewer resources in online than in offline shopping decisions. Studies 2 to 4 show that priming an online (vs. offline) shopping context increases reliance on heuristic cues in probability judgments (Study 2) and in product choices (Studies 3 and 4). Results further show that systematic processing of relevant nonheuristic information is reduced after priming online-shopping contexts and suggest that resource-saving expectations associated to online-shopping mediate attitudes toward systematic-options. This research brings novel and important contributions by investigating the role of online shopping contexts on the activation of resource-saving expectations and on the use heuristic cues in consumer decisions. Limits and implications are discussed.