Sustainability rears its head in the current online marketing and virtual store -research. Sustainability considerations involve pro-environmental-, social- and economic values as well as future generations and continuous innovation (Hanss and Böhm, 2012). Central in the sustainability research is sustainable consumer behavior, which has been found to be subject of intensions varying across different types of consumers, issues, and product categories (O’Rourke and Ringer, 2016). Determining consumers’ general egoistic, altruistic and biospheric values (e.g., De Groot and Steg 2008; Steg et al., 2014) have resulted quite complex and not always so generalizable structural models for sustainable behavior. While value -research has been dominant in determining the sustainability intensions and eventual behavior, there are relatively little solid theories and understating about different psychological processes behind sustainable behavior. Furthermore, the consideration of multiple sustainable consumer behavior outcomes seems to be limited, which can also hamper the development of models and theories (see e.g., Hulland and Houston 2021).

Virtual reality (VR) has been set with an expectation of becoming the technology to enable new electronic businesses on metaverse platforms. VR is an application of three-dimensional computer graphics to create a convincing virtual environment where users can interact (Cowan & Ketron, 2019). The most used immersive VR devices are head-mounted displays. Importantly, in addition to visual sense, auditory, haptic, and olfactory senses stimulating devices are used in conjunction with head-mounted displays to reach a multi-sensory VR experience (Xi & Hamari, 2021). VR has been part of the brand strategy for various marketing endeavours (Cowan & Ketron, 2019) such as viewing furniture or kitchen setups by IKEA or creating virtual customer experiences in the real estate sector. However, VR’s impact on the consumer thought model has not been thoroughly examined. This extended abstract contributes to this shortcoming.