How does price variance among purchase channels affect consumers’ cognitive process when shopping online?

The rise of a flourishing online shopping market has expanded the range of purchase channels available to consumers. Meanwhile, the competition among channels has become increasingly fierce. In this study, the changes in cognitive processes caused by price variance among channels were investigated using event-related potentials. Several daily necessities with low or high price variance between a self-operated business channel and third-party seller channels were chosen as the study objects from a well-known electronic business platform. Thirty participants’ electroencephalograms were collected while they faced higher or lower price variance during the experiment. The results showed that small price variances between the two channels tended to intensify component N2, while big price variances tended to diminish component P3. These results suggest that N2 may reflect consumers’ identification process for price variance and inhibition of a planned response, while P3 may reflect the activation of attention caused by task difficulty due to price variance. These findings indicate that the changes in ERP components N2 and P3 may act as cognitive indices that measure customers’ identification and attention distribution when considering product price variances among online purchase channels.