BISC welcomed Dr Anthony Tang from the University of Macau on 28th November 2017, who delivered a research presentation  'Curbing Shopping Cart Abandonment in C2C Markets - An Uncertainty Reduction Approach' during his one day visit.

Shopping cart abandonment (SCA) is the phenomenon whereby an online buyer places items into his/her virtual shopping cart but eventually chooses to abandon payment. Dr Tang's research relates SCA behavior to buyers’ uncertainty perceptions about both the seller and a product. Building on the e-commerce literature, his research identifies seller uncertainty, description uncertainty, and performance uncertainty as the key antecedents of SCA and explore their relative influences on customers’ intention to finalise the transaction.

Drawing upon uncertainty reduction theory (URT) from the communication literature, his work theorises three communication capabilities—perceived effectiveness of product description (PEPD), perceived interactivity (PI), and perceived effectiveness of feedback systems (PEFS)—that facilitate passive, interactive, and active communication strategies, respectively. Anchored on the features of these strategies, he also discusses the relative effectiveness and boundary conditions for these capabilities in reducing different types of uncertainty perceptions.

Survey data were collected from 237 online shoppers who were hesitating to check out items in their virtual shopping carts. The results provide support for our structural model and hypotheses in general, with a few interesting exceptions. His research suggests a plausible explanation of these results and point out their implications for future research. Suggestions for e-commerce practices are also discussed.

Dr Heng Tang (Anthony) received his PhD degree in the Department of Information Systems, City University of Hong Kong. He is currently an assistant professor at the department of Accounting and Information Management, University of Macau. His research interests are in the areas of Business Intelligence, Decision Support Systems, and Electronic Market. His research has appeared in journals such as Decision Support Systems, IEEE Transactions on System, Man and Cybernetics, Information Systems Frontiers, Journal of Information Science, Knowledge-based Systems, etc.