How do flexible options affect customer decision making in an online configurator system?

Product configurators are the prevailing toolkit used to enable online product customisation. Studies of consumer behaviour have acknowledged that consumers are usually indifferent to certain products or product attributes. Thus, they may have multiple satisfactory attribute choices when configuring products. However, existing configurators allow customers to choose only one attribute, which may make customers hard to make decisions. This paper proposes a new, flexible option-based configurator mechanism that allows customers to select multiple attribute choices. We investigate which factors significantly affect customers' decisions to choose multiple options, and whether the flexible configurator increases customers' satisfaction levels. The results of a series of empirical experiments show that the significant factors for utilitarian products and hedonic products are different. Customers gain no extra satisfaction from products customised by a flexible configurator, but enjoy a better configuration process.