Pre-Login vs. Post-Login Search: Evidence from a Mobile Commerce Platform

Although online consumer search behavior has been studied in prior literature, few papers have separated consumers’ search behavior into pre-login searches and post-login searches and examined their respective effects on purchases. Using clickstream data, we develop econometric models to fill this literature gap by examining the effects of consumers’ pre-login and post-login search efforts on purchases. We find that both pre-login and post-login search efforts positively affect consumer purchases. Surprisingly, pre-login search effort has a greater impact than post-login search effort on consumer purchases, demonstrating the importance of the pre-login search effort. We estimate that the potential effects of the pre-login search effort can be as much as 6.53 times greater than those of the post-login search effort. We further show that the effects of both pre-login and post-login search efforts on consumer purchases are not linear but exhibit a diminishing return, suggesting that excessive search effort may adversely affect consumer purchase decisions. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.