Acceptance of imagined versus experienced virtual reality shopping environments: Insights from two experiments

As first Virtual Reality (VR) shopping environments have begun to appear on the market, the question arises whether users will adopt them for doing their shopping. However, the evaluation of systems that have not yet diffused the market is potentially challenging because it requires bringing larger samples of respondents into a VR laboratory. Therefore, by conducting two experimental studies we shed light on the research question of whether evaluating the acceptance requires that respondents experience the immersive and interactive shopping environment. Our results reveal that particularly the hedonic variable perceived enjoyment as well as the VR specific variable perceived telepresence are underestimated when participants only imagine (based on a video) being in a VR shopping environment while there is no difference with respect to the behavioral intention to use the system. In addition, we show that particularly the hedonic variable perceived enjoyment and the utilitarian variable perceived usefulness influence the intention to use the shopping environment in the future. Overall, we conclude that experiencing the VR shopping environment is essential for users to be able to evaluate the respective technology.