Intention–behaviour misalignment at B2C websites: when the horse brings itself to water, will it drink?

We examine factors leading to intention-behaviour misalignment during the current website visit for two groups of website visitors: (1) “directed buyers” who visit with an a priori intention to purchase on the current visit but end up not doing so, and (2) “search/deliberators” who visit with an a priori intention to only gather information for a specific future purchase but end up making a purchase during the current visit. A qualitative study analysed responses by 2660 visitors to the websites of a large hotel management company, 749 of whom acted against their a priori purchase intentions. Based on the results, we propose a theoretical model of factors influencing the intention-behaviour relationship, emphasising those factors that have received little attention in extant research and that have noticeably different impacts for each group, in either facilitating or inhibiting purchasing behaviour. We further explore the interrelationships between various types of uncertainty, anticipated action and inaction regret, and disconfirmed expectations in distorting the intention-behaviour relationship. We close with suggested topics for future research.