E-COMMERCE WEBSITES SERVICES VERSUS BUYERS EXPECTATIONS: AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF THE ONLINE MARKETPLACE

Abstract

With the growth of online shopping, the buyers are faced with information and cognitive overload, entailing worse buyers' decisions. Various decision aids, more and more implemented as web services, aim at reducing this overload. Often they implement compensatory strategies that enable desirable and undesirable values of a product attribute to compensate each other. However, increasing the number of options beyond a handful can lead to poor choices, decreasing satisfaction (i.e., paradox of choice). In such a situation, that involves uncertainty, people relies more on heuristics than rationality to arrive at decisions and purchases. Heuristics, or noncompensatory strategies, do not consider a buyer's preference for multiple attributes, such as the satisficing heuristic that compares each attribute value with a predetermined cut-off level, rejecting alternatives that do not meet it. This paper presents a study combining an E-Commerce literature survey, an E-Commerce websites' analysis, and a survey of online buyers opinions. It is pointing to a gap that exists between sellers' services and buyers' expectations. Empirical evidence suggests that it can be bridged turning to noncompensatory strategies implemented as web services.