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Start date: 2020Subject: search.filters.subject.Electronic commerce

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    Customer experience in immersive virtual reality retail : exploring behaviors, emotions, and touchpoints across the shopping journey : a thesis with publications presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Technology, School of Mathematical and Computational Sciences, Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2025-08-01) Erensoy, Aysu
    Immersive Virtual Reality (iVR) is transforming the retail landscape by merging sensory engagement with the personalization and convenience of digital platforms. As part of the rapidly evolving metaverse, iVR has the potential to redefine customer experience (CX) and create immersive, multisensory shopping environments. However, understanding how iVR shapes customer behaviors, emotions, and interactions across the shopping journey remains limited. These gaps hinder businesses from fully optimizing CX in this emerging domain. This research aims to address these challenges by exploring the influence of iVR retail touchpoints on CX and developing frameworks to advance theoretical and practical knowledge in iVR retail. This study employed a human-centered design methodology, integrating systematic literature reviews, semi-structured interviews with VR design experts, and iVR experiments with end-users. The literature review established a theoretical foundation, identifying challenges and opportunities in iVR retail. Semi-structured interviews with experts explored critical touchpoints, emotions, behaviors, and the design processes underlying iVR environments. Complementing these, VR experiments, card-sorting activities, and end-user interviews captured the behaviors and emotions of participants across the pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase stages of the shopping journey. This study offers significant theoretical advancements by extending the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model to better capture the complexities of CX in immersive virtual environments. It provides a nuanced understanding of how sensory stimuli influence emotional responses and consumer behaviors, particularly within iVR retail contexts. This extension enables a more comprehensive analysis of the relationships between touchpoints, emotions, and shopping processes. Additionally, the study adapts the Double Diamond framework, tailoring it to meet the unique demands of iVR design. This refined framework supports designers in addressing the iterative nature of immersive retail experiences across discovery, definition, development, and delivery phases. Additionally, the key outcome of this research is developing a CX framework that detailed the iVR customer journey, illustrating how user interactions, emotional responses, and behaviors evolve across the pre-purchase, purchase, and post purchase stages. These findings not only highlight the underlying mechanics of creating positive CX in iVR environments but also identify the drivers of emotional connection and satisfaction, laying the groundwork for further exploration and application in this transformative retail medium. This research contributes to both theoretical and practical understanding of iVR retail environments. Theoretically, it advances models such as the S-O-R model and refines the Double Diamond framework, aligning them with the complexities of immersive technologies and offering tools for analyzing how iVR reshapes CX. Practically, the study provides actionable design guidelines to address key challenges in iVR retail, including improving usability with intuitive interfaces, enhancing accessibility through features like voice navigation, and fostering emotional engagement via sensory-rich experiences. These guidelines support the creation of inclusive, engaging, and effective iVR shopping environments that serve as a roadmap for future studies for exploring and validating emergent technological innovations in iVR retail.
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    Improving the robustness and privacy of HTTP cookie-based tracking systems within an affiliate marketing context : a thesis presented in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2021) Amarasekara, Bede Ravindra
    E-commerce activities provide a global reach for enterprises large and small. Third parties generate visitor traffic for a fee; through affiliate marketing, search engine marketing, keyword bidding and through organic search, amongst others. Therefore, improving the robustness of the underlying tracking and state management techniques is a vital requirement for the growth and stability of e-commerce. In an inherently stateless ecosystem such as the Internet, HTTP cookies have been the de-facto tracking vector for decades. In a previous study, the thesis author exposed circumstances under which cookie-based tracking system can fail, some due to technical glitches, others due to manipulations made for monetary gain by some fraudulent actors. Following a design science research paradigm, this research explores alternative tracking vectors discussed in previous research studies within a cross-domain tracking environment. It evaluates their efficacy within current context and demonstrates how to use them to improve the robustness of existing tracking techniques. Research outputs include methods, instantiations and a privacy model artefact based on information seeking behaviour of different categories of tracking software, and their resulting privacy intrusion levels. This privacy model provides clarity and is useful for practitioners and regulators to create regulatory frameworks that do not hinder technological advancement, rather they curtail privacy-intrusive tracking practices on the Internet. The method artefacts are instantiated as functional prototypes, available publicly on Internet, to demonstrate the efficacy and utility of the methods through live tests. The research contributes to the theoretical knowledge base through generalisation of empirical findings and to the industry by problem solving design artefacts.
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    A resource co-evolutionary model for the internationalization of internet intermediary firms : evidence from New Zealand based internet payment intermediary firms : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in International Business Management at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2020) Wu, Mian
    Purpose - The purpose of this thesis is to explore the internationalization process of Internet Intermediary Firms (IIFs) and explain the unfolding of this process using a resource co-evolutionary lens of organizational knowledge and network resources. The leading research question of this study is thus “through a resource co-evolutionary lens, how and why is the internationalization of IIFs driven by the joint development of knowledge and network resources?” Methodology/approach/design – To answer the leading research question, this thesis applies a process-based research approach to seven qualitative case studies of the internationalization of New Zealand based Internet Payment Intermediaries (IPIs). Findings - This thesis identifies six internationalization episode patterns of IIFs, which are inception, siloing, bundling, multiplying, international replicating, and international withdrawal. The overall internationalization process of IIFs are non-linear but structurally predictable. Changes across these patterns take place at five human and non-human layers of IIF-centric digital platform-based ecosystem architecture – users, platforms, IIFs, usage scenarios, and sellers. Moreover, this thesis finds that IIFs’ product logic, user logic, buyer users, seller users, and cloud-based platform providers are their critical organizational knowledge and network resources, respectively. These knowledge and network resources co-evolve during internationalization, enabling the unfolding of the internationalization of IIFs. The “motor” of change derives from the IIFs’ choice of network externalities, internalization and externalization business approach. Through a resource co-evolutionary lens, this thesis finally provides a three-tier operational process model to describe and explain the internationalization process of IIFs. Practical implications - The message to IIF practitioners is that international development needs to be understood from a processual and structural view. The associated architectural resource properties of IIF-centric platform-based ecosystem and their joint actions are the keys to understanding their intricate global evolution processes. This study also signals international sellers a shift from adapting to the fluid and unruly digital ecosystems to governing the ecosystem through collaborating with IIFs. Originality/value - This is the first study of IIF internationalization. This thesis identifies the non-linear but structurally predictable internationalization process patterns of IIFs which is new to the literature. Moreover, this thesis also reveals the new types of organizational knowledge and network resources, explicitly enabling the internationalization of IIFs. This study constructively extends the traditional resource-based view towards a resource co-evolutionary view to explain the research phenomenon. The operational process model proposed in this study for the first sheds light on how to govern the business ecosystem, which is of both practical and theoretical importance.