Use or Not: A Qualitative Study on the User Adoption and Abandonment of Voice Shopping with Smart Speakers

Abstract

The recent advances in smart speakers impel the emergence and prevalence of voice shopping – placing orders on voice assistants. Previous work has studied user acceptance of voice shopping and the factors influencing users’ experience of voice shopping. However, despite the growing interest in the use of voice shopping, little is known about the limited usage or abandonment of voice shopping. In this paper, we address this research gap through a qualitative study of 43 users of Tmall Genie, a smart speaker popular in China. We found that participants are willing to make low-involvement purchases via voice shopping. However, after a period of use, participants tend to limit or abandon voice shopping due to time-consuming interaction and mistrust of voice shopping. Based on our findings, we discuss how our study could advance the understanding of voice shopping and present implications for researchers and practitioners on technical robustness, adaptive conversational product presentation, and cross-platform product recommendations for the future design of voice shopping systems.