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Companies have the opportunity to better engage potential customers by presenting products to them in a highly immersive virtual reality (VR) shopping environment. However, a minimal amount is known about why and whether customers will adopt such fully immersive shopping environments. We therefore develop and experimentally validate a theoretical model, which explains how immersion affects adoption. The participants experienced the environment by using a head-mounted display (high immersion) or by viewing product models in 3D on a desktop (low immersion). We find that immersion does not affect the users’ intention to reuse the shopping environment, because two paths cancel each other out: Highly immersive shopping environments positively influence a hedonic path through telepresence, but surprisingly, they negatively influence a utilitarian path through product diagnosticity. We can explain this effect via low readability of product information in the VR environment and expect VR’s full potential to develop when the technology is further advanced. Our study contributes to literature on immersive systems and IS adoption research by introducing a research model for the adoption of VR shopping environments. A key practical implication of our study is that system designers need to pay special attention to the current state of technology when designing VR applications.
With high-immersive virtual reality (VR) systems approaching mass markets, companies are seeking to better understand how consumers behave when shopping in VR. A key feature of high-immersive VR environments is that they can create a strong illusion of reality to the senses, which could substantially change consumer choice behavior compared to online shopping. We compare consumer choice from virtual shelves in two environments: (i) a high-immersive VR environment using a head-mounted display and hand-held controllers with (ii) a low-immersive environment showing products as rotatable 3-D models on a desktop computer screen. We use an incentive-aligned choice experiment to investigate how immersion affects consumer choice. Our investigation comprises three key choice characteristics: variety-seeking, price-sensitivity, and satisfaction with the choice made. The empirical results provide evidence that consumers in high-immersive VR choose a larger variety of products and are less price-sensitive. Choice satisfaction, however, did not increase in high-immersive VR.