A model of consumer web navigational behavior: conceptual development and application

Despite recent success by companies using the Internet to deal with their customers, one of the major remaining problems concerns understanding navigation on the Web and its relationship with Internet marketing. This study looks at the factors that can affect customers' prepurchase intentions by surveying visitors to a real pharmaceutical web site, and it models the behavior of consumers when they are confronted with the navigational characteristics of an Internet site. The model of flow designed by Hoffman and Novak and previous findings and theories about several relevant behavioral variables are taken into account to propose and empirically test a model of consumers' web navigational behavior. We use structural equations modeling to test 10 major hypotheses and more than two third of the 28 subhypotheses are supported. The findings contribute to theoretical and managerial understanding of the web navigation behavior of visitors.