The objective of this paper is to investigate how different online decision-making processes used by
consumers to make a product choice influence the complexity of their online shopping behavior. When
faced with a product selection, consumers are suggested to perform an internal search (e.g., relying on
their prior knowledge of brands) and if necessary, an external search. The latter may comprise activities
such as gathering more information about brands and seeking recommendations from relevant others.
Thus, different consumers may use different decision-making strategies to make a consumption decision
(Olshavsky, 1985; Payne et al., 1993). Furthermore, consumers shopping online may modify or change
the way they search for information to take advantage of certain unique characteristics of the Internet
(Peterson and Merino, 2003). For instance, the presence of new information sources such as recommender
systems, intelligent-agent-based systems, and less easily accessible sources offline (e.g., opinions of a
large group of consumers on a specific product) may modify the way, in which consumers perform their
external information search. In this paper, we investigate the effect of different decision-making processes
on consumers’ shopping behaviors (e.g., decision time, pages visited, etc.) while performing an online
goal-directed activity, namely, the selection of a product.