Tailoring e-commerce sites to ease recovery after disruptions

Developers of e-commerce applications are often unrealistic about how their Web site is going to be used, and about possible outcomes during site usage. The most commonly considered outcomes of a user's visit to a site are firstly that the visit culminates in a sale, and secondly that the user leaves the site without buying anything - perhaps to return later. In the second case, sites often "remember" any accumulated items so that a shopper can return at a later stage to resume shopping. In this paper, we consider certain disruptions, such as breakdowns, problems caused by human errors and interruptions, which could affect the outcome of the e-commerce shopping experience. These events have definite and possibly long-lasting effects on users, and applications should therefore be developed to cater for these eventualities so as to enhance the usability of the site and encourage further usage. We develop a model for analysing e-commerce application usage and, using this model, propose an evaluation strategy for determining whether an e-commerce site is resistant to such factors. The proposed evaluation mechanism is applied to three sites to arrive at what we call a "disruption-resistance score"

The display of electronic commerce within virtual environments

In today’s competitive business environment, the majority of companies are expected to be represented on the Internet in the form of an electronic commerce site. In an effort to keep up with current business trends, certain aspects of interface design such as those related to navigation and perception may be overlooked. For instance, the manner in which a visitor to the site might perceive the information displayed or the ease with which they navigate through the site may not be taken into consideration. This paper reports on the evaluation of the electronic commerce sites of three different companies, focusing specifically on the human factors issues such as perception and navigation. Heuristic evaluation, the most popular method for investigating user interface design, is the technique employed to assess each of these sites. In light of the results from the analysis of the evaluation data, virtual environments are suggested as a way of improving the navigation and perception display constraints

The assessment of usability of electronic shopping: A heuristic evaluation

Today there are thousands of electronic shops accessible via the Web. Some provide user-friendly features whilst others seem not to consider usability factors at all. Yet, it is critical that the electronic shopping interface is user-friendly so as to help users to obtain their desired results. This study applied heuristic evaluation to examine the usability of current electronic shopping. In particular, it focused on four UK-based supermarkets offering electronic services: including ASDA, Iceland, Sainsbury, and Tesco. The evaluation consists of two stages: a free-flow inspection and a task-based inspection. The results indicate that the most significant and common usability problems have been found to lie within the areas of ‘User Control and Freedom’ and ‘Help and Documentation’. The findings of this study are applied to develop a set of usability guidelines to support the future design of effective interfaces for electronic shopping

Evaluation of the performance of e-commerce using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP): business perspectives on e-commerce / Sid Sirisukha

The purpose of this study is to employ the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to evaluate electronic commerce (e- commerce) types. An important contribution of this study is the identification of business perspectives on e-commerce types. This study articulates distinctive characteristics of the types of e- commerce and management processes that extend the range of applicability across diverse business segments. The Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) helps the decision maker such as business executives to prioritize alternatives in B2B, B2C, and C2B as e- commerce types, so that the best one can be selected. As business innovation has relied increasingly on partnerships between business and supplier, there is a different perspective of how business executives view their business process and competitive advantage. Based on the findings from this study, one important way for business people to be heard is to devote their time to create competitive advantage and develop shared domain knowledge which appear as the most influential construct in the AHP model. Business executives need to understand the leverage points of the industry, the history and current issues of the e-commerce, and to learn to apply business- oriented objectives in the application of technology to gain competitive advantage. This change in view would help focus their attention on e-commerce technology and ideas that will produce the most benefit and create competitive advantage, rather than those that offer the most technical promise

Understanding the beliefs and intentions in search and purchase functions in an e-commerce web site

10.1109/TEM.2008.922641IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management561106-114IEEM