Understanding consumer search activity and online purchase intensions for improving the product recommendation search

For product recommendation search, there is a need to explore consumer search style and purchase intensions. This paper presents results of an ongoing research project. It aims at investigating consumers' decision-making styles in order to get detailed pictures of online shoppers. The notion of consumer life style is applied in this exploratory study and the preliminary results indicate that there are three types of shoppers. They are: (1) fashionable and self-discipline shopper", (2) general shopper, and (3) pragmatic shoppers. In addition, there are three influential factors for shoppers' pre-purchase search behavior, they are: (1) product attribute, (2) web store evaluation, and (3) special function and promotion. A product recommendatory system is under development based on the statistical results of this exploratory study. The recommendatory system is expected to provide relevant search results based on individual shoppers' decision-making styles.