I Am Confused: Coping With Customer Confusion in Metaverse Shopping

Retailers are exploring the metaverse as a shopping platform to provide customers with a more interactive and immersive experience. Customers, on the other hand, are also curious about knowing the intricacies and functionalities of this new highly immersive shopping platform. However, alongside this curiosity, there is a prevailing lack of clarity and ambiguity about the metaverse leading to confusion in the minds of prospective customers. The current study aims to identify antecedents to customer confusion in metaverse shopping. Researchers acknowledge that customers will find their own ways to cope with this undesired state of confusion. Thus, we extend a conceptual framework embedding antecedents and coping strategies for customer confusion. We propose a quantitative methodology using PLS-SEM. The study proposes implications for retailers, policymakers, and academic researchers.