E-Commerce: Usability and NavigationBrandon Burgess MCCNM 336 Fall 2003
____________________________________________________________________________________IntroductionSome would say that the Internet revolution is happening at this very moment. Soon most if not all of our daily activities will flow through a computer. There are several key factors for this revolution; the decrease in price for a personal computer, the wide spread growth of broadband, and more disposable income for families. With all these changes focusing on computers and their potential to make life easier, one quickly realizes that the Internet and technology must eliminate some of the everyday hassles that occur in life to make life easier. One of these hassles, particularly to men is shopping. Lets take a trip to the local shopping mall and break it down to see how many processes are involved in a day of shopping. First off, you must go to the mall, this requires you to leave the comfort of your house and spend money to get there via gas. Secondly, you must fight traffic all the way there, and once you finally reach the mall, you are forced to spend all that time searching for a parking space. Once you manage to get into the mall you better be ready to walk several miles searching each store for a particular item, then searching each store that has that item for the least expensive one. After you have decided to purchase that item you must know go find a register that does not have 5 of more people waiting at it. Repeat that search method for every item you purchase. Leaving the mall you incur those same problems you did trying to get to the mall and when you finally get home you swear off shopping ever again. Wouldn't it be easier if you could just stay home and shop for everything you will need right at your computer? That is what businesses are hoping for as they are now investing more capital into developing e-commerce site where consumers can search through all their products, pick out whatever you want, purchase them with any credit card and just sit back and wait for the product to come to you. As more businesses continue to introduce their e-commerce sites to consumers, they are learning what exactly their customers expect from their Website. No longer do customers accept seeing the company's mail order catalog online, customers desire three dimensional pictures and more of a presentation of the product, not just a mere description. As organizations continue to educate themselves on what customers want it is becoming increasingly clear that usability and navigation will play a large role in how successful and e-commerce Website can become. Overview of E-commerceE-commerce began to surface during the mid to late 1990's when there was economic prosperity in the United States and throughout the world. Computers were getting faster and could hold more information than ever before and the prices on these computers were declining. During that same time period the Internet exploded onto the mainstream and everyone was getting online to check out what the Internet had to offer. Business took notice and realized this was another way to make money. The soon realized however that it wasn't going to be a walk in the park to convince their customers to shop for their products online. The three barriers to online shopping were purchase failures, security fears and service frustrations (Thompson, 2002, p.259) . Also business did not know how to market their products online and often consumers were left confused on how to go about shopping and purchasing items online. One of the barriers of online shopping, security fears was taken care of when Visa and MasterCard established a standard protocol for credit card purchases on the web. But 1997 will mark the turning point – the harried masses can began surfing to save time (and money) rather that kill it. Soon buying many things on the Web will be easier, cheaper and more secure than going to stores or flipping through catalogues, credit card in hand. By the end of the decade online retail stores could soar tenfold, while business-to-business transaction could explode by a factor of 100 (Goldblatt & Stipp, 1996). UsabilityWhen e-commerce was beginning usability was not much of a concern for businesses because the people accessing the Internet and using it on a frequent basis were people who work or were very interested in computer and the Internet. They knew how to surf the net. Once the Internet explosion happened several more people were logging on and surfing the net that were not familiar with download or loading time and often got frustrated when pages took to long to load. In the context of the Internet, respondents generally spent a reasonable amount of time or much time surfing prior to online purchase. Impulse buying seemed to be quite low. Basically, this shows that buyers were generally cautious and were likely to search for information prior to purchase (Thompson, 2002, p.263) . This points out that if a business site took to long to load and was to cluttered, consumers would be turned off of the site and would go and visit another business' site. Usability should be look at as a challenge not a barrier, because most e-commerce businesses realize that consumers are still using a 56k modem and visiting your site with a resolution of 800x600 they do not need the fancy images and flash to impress them. The only thing unnecessary items on a Website do is increase loading time which will frustrate the consumer. Companies intending to set up a Web presence should realize that it is important that web pages take little time to download. Users are unwilling to tolerate delays associated with delivering audio, animation, graphics and video. Web pages that are difficult to retrieve may frustrate surfers to the point where they leave the Website (Thompson, 2002, p.267) . When building a e-commerce site businesses should make it simple and effective that way when their customers use their 56k modem and 800x600 resolution computer they can look through your site much faster than before. NavigabilityInteractive tools designed to assist consumers in the initial screening of available alternatives and to facilitate in-depth comparisons among selected alternatives in an online shopping environment may have strong favorable effects on both the quality and the efficiency of purchase decisions – shoppers can make much better decisions while expending substantially less effort (Haubl & Trifts, 2000, p.4) . Internet shopping is a two-stage process. At the first stage, consumers typically screen a large set of available products and identify a subset of the most promising alternatives. Subsequently, they evaluate the latter in more depth, perform relative comparisons across products on important attributes, and make a purchase decision (Haubl & Trifts, 2000, p.4) . With such an elaborate process a part of every purchase decision that a customer makes it is no wonder that they want to be able to navigate through a site with relative ease. If they have to click the back button several times to get back to the main page pretty soon that will get tiresome and the customer will be focusing more on how long it takes to get around a particular Website rather than focusing on deciding what product of the company's they are going to purchase. the old KISS analogy is perfect when talking about ideal navigability in a Website. The simpler a Website is the greater number of customers who will be able to use and understand it There are several price comparison-shopping engines that will navigate the Internet for the shopper. The shopping engines search the entire Internet for any particular item the customer chooses and then brings back a report to the user with every place that product is available at and the price of the item. If price-comparison tool adoption continues, prices will decline sharply during a relativity short period of time (Kocas, 2002-2003, p.117) . As one can see, price-comparison searches not only save the customer time from having to search all over the world wide web, it also saves them money because now consumers can easily see the price differences between stores and select the lowest priced. Emerging Technologies aiding E-commerceThe rapid growth of online consumers and suppliers of goods and services over the past several years led to an increasing need to match the two groups by processing an enormous amount of information available on the Web and providing value-added services through supplying specialized information that make interactions between the consumers and suppliers easier and more efficient (Adomavicius & Tuzhilin, 2002, p.313). Any new technology that is implemented for e-commerce there is an implication that the new technology will in some way improve the interaction between a business and the customer. There are several new technologies currently in development for e-commerce one being the customer gets their body scanned and that virtual model is downloaded to the person's computer that way when they are searching for new clothes and they find an outfit they would like to possibly buy they can dress up their virtual model in those clothes to see how it would look on them. Another technology emerging in e-commerce as well as on the Internet is the idea of an e-Butler which observes the owners usage on the Internet and collects data on which sites are visited, if purchases are made what size the product is as well as color and will give alternative Websites when searching for particular items. Being a consumer centric service, it ensures thrust of the consumer in various suggestions offered by e-Butler and guarantees that they represent the needs of the customer and not the interests of the businesses “pushing” their offerings on consumers (Adomavicius & Tuzhilin, 2002, p.314). In applying this new technology to e-commerce it can provide the following services to its users. E-Butler can modify current and generate new browsing requests. When the user types in a URL and begins the search, e-Butler may decide to modify the current URL by recommending another URL. For example the user may type in retailer xyz.com to purchase a shirt, e-Butler would fulfill the search request as well as give an alternate URL if it thinks it offers a better value on a shirt. Another way e-Butler can be used is to modify current and generate new search queries, which is when a search query entered by the user is modified by e-Butler whenever it believes that the modified query would reflect the users needs better. For example if the user types in “walking shoes”, e-Butler may change the search to “black, walking shoes, size 10” because the user has a size 10 shoe and usually buy black shoes. Finally e-Butler can be used to modify current and generate new purchasing requests, buy searching the Internet for sale items and various discounts offered by different retailers. E-Butler can also monitor various product offerings at different Websites and notify the user when a particular item they might be interested is on sale (Adomavicius & Tuzhilin, 2002, p.315) . ConclusionE-commerce is just beginning to have an impact on our lives and our economy. I like to compare it to e-mail in the way that e-mail started out slow and then exploded to the degree that most people have a few different e-mail accounts and check their e-mail several times a day. The key elements to allowing this breakthrough are usability and navigability. Once Websites are tailored to the customer and allow for hassle free access and easy navigation throughout a site e-commerce will become a mainstream phenomenon that will affect every one connected to the Internet. As soon as business really figure out how exactly to market their products through their Website and as long as technology continues to advance and close the virtual gap between consumer and business than e-commerce will grow exponentially. E-commerce will never replace all of the shopping needs that humans have but it has and will continue to be a valuable alternative to purchase want items at a lower cost and at the convince of the user not the business. ReferencesAdomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A., (2002, June 07). An architecute of e-Butler: A consumer-centric online personalization system [Electronic Version]. International Journal of Computational Intelligence and Applications , 3, p.313-327. Retrieved November 15, 2003, From Academic Search Premier database Anthes, G. H., (1999, December 13). The Quest for E-Quality [Electronic Version]. Computerworld ,50, p.46-47. Retrieved October 14, 2003, From Academic Search Premier database http://web14.epnet.com Bass, S., (2000, November). Today's Super Bargains? Look on the Web [Electronic Version]. PC World ,11, p.55. Retrieved October 14, 2003, From Academic Search Premier database http://web17.epnet.com Goldblatt, H., Stipp, D., (1996, December 09). The birth of digital commerce [Electronic Version]. Fortune ,11, p.159-161. Retrieved October 14, 2003, From Academic Search Premier database http://web.17.epnet.com Häubl, G., Trifts, V., (2000, Winter). Consumer Decision Making in Online Shopping Environments: The Effects of Interactive Decision Aids [Electronic Version]. Marketing Science ,1, p.4-21. Kocas, C., (2002-2003, Winter). Evolution of Prices in Electronic Markets Under Diffusion of Price-Comparison Shopping [Electronic Version]. Journal of Management Information Systems ,3, p.99-119. Thompson, S. H. T., (2002). Attitudes toward online shopping and the Internet [Electronic Version]. Behaviour & Information ,4, p.259-271. Retrieved October 10, 2003, From Academic Search Premier database. |