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Virtual stores can be used to identify influences on consumer shopping behavior. Deception is one technique that may be used to attempt to increase the realism of virtual stores.
The objective of the experiment was to test whether the purchasing behavior of participants in a virtual shopping task varied based on whether they were told that they would receive the products they selected in a virtual convenience store (a form of deception) or not.
We recruited a US national sample of 402 adult current smokers by email from an online panel of survey participants. They completed a fully automated randomized virtual shopping experiment with a US $15 or US $20 budget in a Web-based virtual convenience store. We told a random half of participants that they would receive the products they chose in the virtual store or the cash equivalent (intervention condition), and the other random half simply to conduct a shopping task (control condition). We tested for differences in demographics, tobacco use behaviors, and in-store purchases (outcome variable, assessed by questionnaire) by experimental condition.
The characteristics of the participants (398/402, 99.0% with complete data) were comparable across conditions except that the intervention group contained slightly more female participants (103/197, 52.3%) than the control group (84/201, 41.8%;
We found that telling participants that they will receive the products they select in a virtual store did not influence their purchases. This finding suggests that deception may not affect consumer behavior and, as a result, may not be necessary in virtual shopping experiments.
Virtual reality retail stores enable researchers to examine the real-time impact of changes in the retail environment on consumer behavior. Virtual store experiments can be used to understand the effects of changes such as store layout, product placement, advertising, and the presence of public health mass media campaigns on behaviors such as the type and number of products purchased and time spent in the store. Virtual stores provide a better method than static images on a computer screen of testing changes in the shopping environment [
One persistent question in virtual store research is the degree to which the products that consumers select in the virtual store reflect the products they would select in a brick-and-mortar store or the products they actually want to purchase. A few studies have validated virtual store purchases with other shopping scenarios and have produced promising results. One such experiment used participant-provided receipts from supermarket purchases to validate virtual store purchases and found high levels of consistency between virtual and actual purchases [
One aspect of research on virtual store experiments that remains unexplored is whether using deception in the instructions for the virtual store may improve the realistic nature of the virtual store (make virtual shopping experiences more closely resemble actual shopping experiences). Deception is a commonly used [
The objective of the experiment was to test whether the purchasing behavior of participants in a virtual shopping task varied based on whether they were told that they would receive the products they selected in a virtual convenience store (a form of deception) or not. We varied the virtual store instructions for iShoppe to include deception or not. We hypothesized that we would find differences in virtual store shopping behavior based on whether the store instructions included deception or not.
Research Triangle Institute (RTI) International’s institutional review board approved all study procedures. Between May 4 and May 11, 2015 (the time necessary for the quota of 400 participants to be reached), Lightspeed Online Research, LLC (Warren, NJ, USA), a market research company that provides data collection services for consumer research studies, recruited an online (invitation-only or closed) sample of adult current cigarette smokers living in the United States from their existing global panel of more than 5.5 million survey participants Lightspeed recruits panel participants through email, internet ad banners, social media, e-newsletters, and referrals from recruiting partners.
Inclusion criteria for participation in the online-only randomized experiment were reporting living in one of the states in the United States, being the same age as or older than the tobacco minimum legal sales age for their state (18-21 years of age or older), and currently smoking cigarettes some days or every day (internet and computer literacy were also de facto inclusion criteria because the study was conducted online only). Exclusion criteria were not living in the United States, being under the tobacco minimum legal sales age for their state, and currently smoking cigarettes rarely or never.
Potential participants were invited by email to complete an online screener (6 items on 6 pages) to determine their eligibility to participate in the voluntary study: “GlobalTestMarket is looking for your opinion. Don’t miss out on being rewarded for sharing your opinions. Complete this survey today!” The email also contained a survey number, an offer of 100 “market points” (approximately US $5 worth of points that could be redeemed for products and services from several corporate sponsors) for survey completion, and the URL for the screener. If participants met the inclusion criteria, they were provided a unique participant identifier (no identifying information was collected) and completed the informed consent. The consent invited them to click a checkbox to agree to complete the virtual shopping task in RTI International’s iShoppe (developed in 2011 by a team of graphic designers at RTI International and software programmers, as part of a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation project in Research Triangle Park, NC, USA, using Unity 3D software;
After consenting, participants were randomly assigned to the intervention (deception) condition or the control (no deception) condition in a one-to-one (parallel) ratio (using a random number generator built into the software). All participants were aware that they were participating in a research study, but they were blinded to experimental condition (researchers analyzing the resulting data were not blinded to condition). After providing consent, participants were provided a link to the virtual store experiment, which began by providing directions that participants could purchase anything in the store (within a budget) and that, when done, they should click on the virtual clerk, who would help them complete their purchases. All participants had a budget of either US $15 or US $20. We assigned the higher budget to participants living in areas with higher excise taxes on cigarettes to ensure that all participants could afford to purchase tobacco products in the virtual store. In the intervention condition, we also instructed participants that, after completing the virtual shopping task, they would receive the products they selected from the virtual store by mail or, if the products were unavailable, the cash equivalent. We gave participants in the control condition no additional instructions. No alcohol products were available for purchase in the virtual store because some participants were under 21 years of age.
After completing the virtual shopping task, participants completed a short survey assessing their demographics and tobacco use (51 items on 51 pages). We developed all surveys (screener and postexperiment survey) based on literature reviews and, when possible, by using and modifying items from existing surveys. Surveys were tested by study staff and non–study staff employed by RTI International before fielding. Surveys contained skip patterns to reduce participant burden, but the order of the items was not random. Participants were required to complete all survey items (they could respond “prefer not to answer” or “don’t know”) before advancing to the next page or submitting the surveys. We analyzed only surveys with complete responses. Participants were able to log out and back in to the survey to accommodate participants unable to complete the experiment in one sitting. Speed checks were used to identify participants who completed the survey too quickly; however, no surveys were excluded for this reason.
At the end of the survey, during the debriefing, all participants were instructed that they would receive a Visa e-gift card for US $20 (in addition to the Lightspeed incentive). Participants in the intervention condition were informed that they would receive the gift card in place of receiving the items they selected in the store by mail.
We examined demographic and tobacco use variables across the intervention and control groups to characterize the sample and ensure that randomization was complete. Demographic variables, all of which were categorical, were age (≤34 years, 35-54 years, or ≥55 years of age); sex (male or female); race/ethnicity (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, Hispanic, or non-Hispanic other); education (some high school or less, high school graduate or General Education Development, some college, or college graduate or beyond, such as postgraduate or professional degree); and annual household income (≤$25,000, $25,000-$49,999, $50,000-$74,999, or ≥$75,000 annually, all in US $). Categorical tobacco use variables were number of days smoked in the past 30 (none, 1-2 days, 3-5 days, 6-9 days, 10-19 days, 20-29 days, or 30 days); ever daily smoking (yes or no); the last time the participant smoked (within the last hour, 1-2 hours ago, 2-5 hours ago, 5-10 hours ago, within the past day, or 2 days ago or longer); how soon after waking the participant usually smoked his or her first cigarette (≤5 minutes, 6-30 minutes, 31-60 minutes, or after 60 minutes); current smokeless tobacco use (yes or no); current use of cigars, cigarillos, or little cigars (yes or no); stopping smoking for 1 day or more in the past 12 months (yes or no); desire to quit smoking (not at all, a little, somewhat, or a lot); and planning to stop smoking in the next 30 days (yes or no). The only continuous variable was mean number of cigarettes per day smoked in the past 30 days. In addition, we examined the percentage of participants in the deception condition who reported that they understood that they might get all or some of the products that they selected in the store and that they might get a gift card in place of those products. Participants in the no deception condition were not asked this question.
The primary outcome variable, which was self-assessed online, was clicking to purchase any tobacco products. Secondary outcome variables were clicking to purchase cigarettes, e-cigarettes, cigars, or smokeless tobacco products (coded as 1 or more versus 0, the reference category), number of total items and tobacco product items purchased, dollars and percentage of the budget spent in total and on tobacco products only, and amount of time spent in the store.
The independent variable was condition (intervention or control, reference).
We used
Lightspeed contacted via email over 30,000 (32,588) members, of whom 2607 (8.00%) visited the screener site [
Virtual store behaviors by experimental conditiona among participants who completed a virtual shopping experiment (n=398).
| Outcomes | Experimental group | Total (n=398) | |||
| Control (n=201) | Intervention (n=197) | ||||
| Any tobacco | 124 (61.7) | 114 (57.9) | 238 (59.8) | .44 | |
| Cigarettes | 115 (57.2) | 99 (50.3) | 214 (53.8) | .16 | |
| e-Cigarettes | 14 (7.0) | 17 (8.6) | 31 (7.8) | .54 | |
| Cigars | 3 (1.5) | 3 (1.5) | 6 (1.5) | .98 | |
| Smokeless tobacco | 4 (2.0) | 3 (1.5) | 7 (1.8) | .72 | |
| Amount spent in US $ | 14.6 (3.9) | 14.4 (3.5) | 14.5 (3.7) | .63 | |
| Percentage of budget spent | 86.9 (19.0) | 87.3 (18.5) | 87.1 (1.9) | .84 | |
| Amount spent on tobacco products in US $ | 5.4 (5.2) | 5.1 (5.2) | 5.2 (5.2) | .66 | |
| Percentage of budget spent on tobacco products | 31.9 (30.0) | 30.9 (30.7) | 31.4 (30.3) | .74 | |
| Number of items purchased | 5.9 (3.2) | 5.8 (2.7) | 5.9 (3.0) | .64 | |
| Number of tobacco product items purchased | 0.9 (0.9) | 0.8 (0.9) | 0.9 (0.9) | .54 | |
| Total time in store (minutes) | 5.0 (3.9) | 5.7 (3.9) | 5.3 (3.9) | .07 | |
aParticipants in the intervention (deception) condition were told that they would receive the products that they selected in the virtual store by mail (or the cash equivalent if the products were unavailable). Participants in the control (no deception) condition were told they would receive the cash equivalent of the products they selected.
Only 46.99% (1225/2607) of those who clicked on the link finished the first page of the screener. Of the 402 participants, 398 (99.0%) provided complete data (
Overall, participants were predominantly white with high levels of education and income (
The control condition had slightly fewer female participants than the intervention condition (
The percentage of participants who purchased any tobacco products did not vary by condition (
We found no significant differences in the purchasing behavior of participants in this virtual shopping experiment (for overall purchases or tobacco-specific purchases) based on whether we told them that they would receive the products they selected (ie, using deception) or not. This finding suggests that deception does not affect the products that participants select in a virtual store.
No previous study, to our knowledge, has examined the impact of deception on purchasing behavior in a virtual store experiment. Our results suggest that deception may not make the virtual store more believable, that is, more likely to reflect consumer preferences (the products that consumers actually want to purchase). Our results are consistent with several research studies that found no differences between experimental conditions that contained deception and those that did not. Barrera and Simpson [
Although the literature has not examined the role of deception in virtual stores, existing research has found that virtual stores provide valid information on actual shopping behavior. Using a consumer panel recruited by phone in the Netherlands, van Herpen et al [
Based on the findings of this analysis alone, we cannot definitively conclude that deception is not needed in virtual store research. First, it is possible that unmeasured confounders explain the nonsignificant difference in shopping behavior by condition; however, randomization lessens this possibility. Second, we cannot be sure that deception was successful. Although we know that most participants in the deception condition understood that they would receive the products (or some of them) and that they might get a gift card instead of the products, it remains unclear how many of them believed they would receive the products (as opposed to the gift card). One potential explanation for the lack of differences in shopping behavior by condition is that neither group believed that they would receive the products they selected. It also remains unclear whether respondents’ in-store shopping behavior would have been different had we promised to give them the products they selected immediately after they completed the experiment (which was not possible because the study was administered online), as opposed to saying we would mail them the products at a later date. Given these limitations, the results of this analysis should be interpreted with caution.
The purchasing behavior of virtual shoppers did not vary based on whether or not they were told that they would receive the products they selected in the virtual store. The results of this study suggest that deception about the receipt of goods following a virtual shopping task is unlikely to affect consumer behavior in virtual stores.
Screenshots of the iShoppe virtual convenience store.
Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) flow diagram.
CONSORT-EHEALTH checklist (V 1.6.1).
Demographic characteristics and tobacco use behavior by experimental group among participants who completed a virtual shopping experiment (n=398).
Research Triangle Institute
This research was funded by the US National Institutes of Health, National Institute on Drug Abuse, and the US Food and Drug Administration Center for Tobacco Products (grant P50DA036128).
None declared.