Intelligent E-Commerce Applications, Online Consumer Behavior, and Firm Strategy

Dear Colleagues,

Electronic commerce has moved from being a distribution channel to becoming the engine of retail growth. Global retail e-commerce sales are accounting for close to a quarter of total worldwide retail spending, up from under 19% just three years earlier (Statista, 2025). This growth is no longer driven merely by internet access but also by the diffusion of intelligent technologies embedded into the shopping experience. AI now underpins product recommendations, conversational agents, and fraud-detection systems, with generative AI projected to add hundreds of billions of dollars in annual value to the retail sector (Cleveroad, 2025). Moreover, autonomous AI agents are starting to handle pricing, inventory balancing, CRM, and merchandising decisions with minimal human intervention (McKinsey & Company, 2026). Consumer behavior is being reshaped by a multitude of intelligent applications: shoppers increasingly discover products through algorithmic feeds, zero-click searches, and AI-generated recommendations, complete transactions via conversational and voice interfaces, and increasingly via their AI agents. Consumers also form purchase intentions through immersive technologies such as augmented and virtual reality, rather than through the static product pages of early e-commerce. 

This convergence of intelligent systems together with evolving consumer psychology raises pressing theoretical and managerial questions. How do intelligent e-commerce applications, such as hyper-personalization, virtual influencers, and generative AI content, alter trust, autonomy, intentions, and actual purchase? What are the behavioral and psychophysiological signatures of consumer attitude and trust toward intelligent e-commerce applications such as conversational avatars and AI agents? How will emerging formats—live-stream commerce, social commerce, voice commerce, and immersive retail—reconfigure the consumer journey across various individual, cultural, and regulatory contexts? And as intelligent e-commerce applications scale globally, how should firms react? For instance, how should firms balance the commercial benefits of hyper-personalization against growing consumer and regulatory concerns over data privacy and algorithmic transparency? How can firms design AI-mediated shopping experiences that enhance consumer emotions, engagement, and trust rather than eroding them? And what intelligent e-commerce strategies can firms follow to create seamless omnichannel experiences and adapt to consumer, cultural, and regulatory realities (e.g., the EU's GDPR and emerging data-protection frameworks in the Gulf, Asia, and worldwide; policies protecting vulnerable groups and limiting access to social media for certain cohorts)? 

These questions are timely for academia and practice: they sit at the intersection of marketing, information systems, consumer psychology, computer science, and related disciplines, and their resolution has implications for how firms design trustworthy, effective, and ethically defensible intelligent e-commerce applications and strategies. 

Aims and Scope

This Special Issue aims to present and disseminate the most recent theoretical and empirical advances related to intelligent e-commerce applications and their behavioral, financial, and moral consequences for online consumers and markets. We welcome contributions from around the world that examine how AI (including Gen AI), machine learning, immersive technologies, and data-driven personalization are transforming consumer decision-making, trust formation, and purchase behavior in digital marketplaces, as well as papers that critically assess the risks, ethical boundaries, and cross-cultural variation associated with these applications. Conceptual/theoretical papers and empirical studies (quantitative, qualitative, experimental, or mixed-methods, including studies employing psychophysiological or neurophysiological measures) are encouraged, as are systematic literature reviews, meta-analyses, or other papers that consolidate and extend the field’s theoretical foundations. 

Topics of interest for publication include, but are not limited to, the following:

• The effects of intelligent e-commerce applications on consumer attitude, trust, perceived risk, fairness perceptions, and purchasing.
• Intelligent e-commerce in the digital and omnichannel consumer journey, including mobile commerce and online-to-offline integration.
• Generative AI and conversational commerce: chatbots, virtual shopping assistants, voice and multimodal interfaces, and AI-generated content in online retail.
• Synthetic consumers (“silicon sampling”): LLM-simulated respondents in e-commerce behavioural research and A/B testing.
• Agentic e-commerce: trust, accountability, and welfare implications of autonomous AI shopping and selling agents, including algorithmic price coordination and collusion risk.
• Synthetic media and virtual influencers: parasocial trust, disclosure ethics, and purchase intention in live-stream and social commerce.
• Generative engine optimization (GEO) and post-search discovery: brand content and choice architecture for AI answer engines and shopping agents.
• Psychophysiological and neurophysiological methods for evaluating intelligent e-commerce applications.
• Algorithmic fraud detection, cybersecurity, and consumer protection.
• Intelligent e-commerce applications to enhance sustainability and ethical consumption.
• The personalization–privacy paradox, platform design, and dark patterns: ethical and regulatory implications.
• AI-driven customer retention: subscription commerce and loyalty programs.
• Cross-cultural and cross-national differences in intelligent e-commerce adoption, including emerging markets and cross-border e-commerce.

References

Cleveroad. (2025, September 16). Generative AI in retail in 2026: Top use cases and benefits. https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/generative-ai-in-retail/

McKinsey & Company. (2026, January 9). Merchants unleashed: How agentic AI transforms retail merchandising. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/retail/our-insights/merchants-unleashed-how-agentic-ai-transforms-retail-merchandising

Statista. (2025). E-commerce worldwide – statistics & facts. https://www.statista.com/topics/871/online-shopping/

Dr. Muhammad Aljukhadar
Dr. Mohamad Amir Merhabi
Dr. Yaozhi Zhang
Dr. Sandreen Hitti
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-anonymized peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1400 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• intelligent e-commerce
• autonomous AI agents
• algorithmic trust
• hyper-personalization
• consumer psychophysiology
• conversational commerce
• immersive retail (AR/VR)
• algorithmic transparency
• omnichannel consumer journey
• data privacy regulation