Abstract

It is has been established that sensory interactions, including sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, can affect consumers’ consumption decisions. While various sensory interactions are devised in the offline context, e-commerce has to rely primarily on vision and hearing due to its inability to access other sensory. Previous IS literature has documented the substantial effects of various visual features. However, very few studies have examined auditory features. Drawing on the recent observation that medium noises enhance people’s abstractive thinking and creativity, this study tries to investigate this topic from a novel perspective that ambient sounds can promote users’ appreciation of innovative products when shopping online. The preliminary results of a lab experiment show that medium noise or music can improve participants’ likelihood of buying innovative products over traditional products, and noise brings other negative effects (e.g. bad mood), while music do not. Theoretical and practical contributions are discussed.

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