How background music of shopping sites affects consumers during festival season

Abstract

Abstract This study focusses on the impact of the background music on consumers' shopping experience during the festival seasons. The authors derived a new research model based on the environmental psychology model in the literature and then designed an empirical experiment to examine changes in consumers' non‐behavioural shopping outcomes under different conditions. The authors built a virtual shopping website and chose a traditional Chinese festival, the Mid‐Autumn Festival, as the experimental scenario in which the authors used a questionnaire to measure the differences in dependent variables formed by different treatments. Data from the online experiment showed that consumers' experience is more positive with music than without the background music, and the consumer's emotions play a mediating role. However, there is no significant effect of music with the theme of the Mid‐Autumn Festival compared to ordinary pop music, which proves that the theme of music does not affect consumers' experience in the online shopping scenario. These findings reflect the psychology and behaviour of consumers when using shopping websites and provide suggestions for shopping site design.

Keywords

• background music
• emotion
• online store
• shopping experience
• website design