Measuring E-Browsing Behaviour and Testing its Impact on Online Immersion

In an online environment, enriched by different types of cues that may distract a consumer, investigating and operationalizing, e-browsing behaviour becomes a must to understand consumer behaviour online. Nevertheless, existing research on the online environment has only used and adapted scales measuring offline browsing. In fact, the existing literature fails to offer a scale measuring browsing specifically in the online context. Consequently, this study fills this gap by developing a scale measuring e-browsing following the Churchill paradigm enriched with the recommendations of Rossiter. For this purpose, a number of methodological instruments are used: two focus groups (the first with 4 experts and the second with 18 consumers) and three surveys (140 students for the first survey, 350 and 200 Internet users, respectively, for the second and third survey). Results put forth a unidimensional scale with 7 items, which seems to exhibit evidence of reliability and validity. The predictive validity was checked by testing the impact of e-browsing on online immersion. The proposed scale measure may help academicians perform better and more reliable studies on consumer behaviour online. It may help managers better understand the traffic on their websites and segment visitors to tailor better conversion strategies.