Research Information System
AVRASYA 15th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOCIAL SCIENCES, Tbilisi, Georgia, 13 - 15 March 2026, pp.590, (Summary Text)
Digital commerce increasingly relies on interfaces shaped by advertising, personalization, and persuasive design, yet these same mechanisms may undermine shopping performance by creating friction and distrust. This study examines how perceived advertising clutter, perceived dark-pattern pressure, and perceived surveillance influence e-cart abandonment through perceived goal impediment, website distrust, and avoidance of online behavioral advertising. Drawing on the Stressor-Strain-Outcome framework, the study conceptualizes these three interface conditions as stressors that disrupt goal-directed shopping and trigger downstream defensive and relational responses. A sequential mixed-methods design was employed. Quantitative evidence was obtained from a two-wave survey of 473 online shoppers and analyzed using PLS-SEM and predictive assessment. Qualitative evidence came from 18 semistructured interviews analyzed through reflexive thematic analysis. The findings show that all three stressors are positively associated with perceived goal impediment, with advertising clutter and dark-pattern pressure exerting the strongest effects. Perceived goal impediment, in turn, increases website distrust, avoidance of online behavioral advertising, and e-cart abandonment. Among the downstream mechanisms, advertising avoidance shows the strongest association with abandonment, indicating that defensive coping is a particularly powerful route to transaction withdrawal. Interview findings further reveal that users experience cluttered layouts, coercive flows, and monitoring cues as cumulative friction, autonomy loss, and cognitive wear, which encourage avoidance routines and premature session exit. The results also clarify why surveillance cues matter differently. The study highlights perceived goal impediment as a central appraisal linking interface pressure to distrust, advertising avoidance, and cart abandonment, offering implications for both digital commerce theory and low-friction interface design.