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

Online korean skincare decision support system

Despite the explosive growth of electronic commerce and the rapidly increasing number of consumers who use interactive media for pre-purchase information search and online shopping, very little is known about how consumers make purchase decisions in such settings. One desirable form of interactivity from a consumer perspective is the implementation of sophisticated tools to assist shoppers in their purchase decisions by customizing the electronic shopping environment to their individual preferences

Determinants of online shopping intention

The internet has become a key medium for the purchase of products and services in virtual markets and has effectively linked all countries and business. It has been estimated that the internet market is worth $300 billion in 1995. Through the internet, electronic commerce offers a tremendously wide variety of electronic business opportunities. One of them is online shopping which has become the third most popular internet activity after e-mail or instant messaging and web browsing. Malaysia is ranked 17th among 27 countries across Europe, Asia-Pacific and North America in terms of the percentage of internet users shopping online. Even though this method has started to win hearts of Malaysian consumers, the factors influencing the willingness to shop online are still unknown. Thus, the general objective of the study is to examine the factors that influence consumer's online shopping intention (dependent variable). The main independent variables are demographic, trusts, quality and loyalty to website visited. A 100 percent response rate was obtained from students sampled randomly. Findings indicate that quality and loyalty contributed 26.8 percent (R2 = 0.268) and 6.1 percent (R2 = 0.061) respectively to the variance in online shopping intention. Implications of the study are discussed

Exploring Antecedents of Private Shopping intention: The Case of Turkish Apparel Industry

The objective of this study is to develop a research model to investigate the impacts of           (i) perceived benefits/risks of online shopping, (ii) the dimensions of both electronic service quality (e-SQ) and electronic service recovery (e-recovery) on electronic commerce satisfaction and electronic loyalty in the setting of private shopping business model among Turkish online shoppers. The hedonic/enjoyment benefit is the only significantly effective benefit of online shopping where other listed benefits and the risks appear to have an insignificant impact on electronic satisfaction. The e-SQ dimension of “system availability” and the e-recovery dimension of “compensation” were not considered significantly effective on e-satisfaction by the respondents, either. In congruence with the previous research findings, e-satisfaction is a major element of e-loyalty in the growing business of private apparels shopping in Turkey. Keywords: Private Shopping, e-service quality, e-satisfaction, e-loyalty

Intershop: A Distributed Architecture for Electronic Shopping

Electronic shopping systems offer new horizons in vendor marketing, customer convenience and overall market efficiencies. Information networks can gather thousands of vendors and millions of customers into an information rich marketplace that serves both their perspectives. Unfortunately, existing electronic shopping systems offer low product differentiation and comparability, little information sm~cturing, rind almost no navigation aids to evaluate multiple shopping opportunities. These systems are proprietary and lack interoperability and cross navigation. This limits market efficiency and results in negative experiences for both vendors and customers. We propose a functional architecture for a new generation of electronic shopping infrastructures to dramatically improve vendor representation and customer navigation. This design provides the ability to shop and compare among multiple heterogeneous product structures and offers the basis for electronic shopping across distributed vendor databases

Culture and e-commerce: An exploration of the perceptions and attitudes of Egyptian internet users

This paper examines the perceptions and attitudes that Egyptian users hold towards electronic shopping sites. Internet sites are globally available, opening up huge potential markets for online retailers. However, it remains unclear whether sites designed for the US or European markets will be acceptable in other cultures. This paper describes an exploratory card sorting study conducted with Egyptian consumers. The study was designed to examine the e-commerce interface features that are most salient to this user group and to explore how these relate to user intentions to engage in internet shopping. The results support the role of site familiarity in predicting purchase intentions within this cultural setting

InShopnito: an advanced yet privacy-friendly mobile shopping application

Mobile Shopping Applications (MSAs) are rapidly gaining popularity. They enhance the shopping experience, by offering customized recommendations or incorporating customer loyalty programs. Although MSAs are quite effective at attracting new customers and binding existing ones to a retailer's services, existing MSAs have several shortcomings. The data collection practices involved in MSAs and the lack of transparency thereof are important concerns for many customers. This paper presents inShopnito, a privacy-preserving mobile shopping application. All transactions made in inShopnito are unlinkable and anonymous. However, the system still offers the expected features from a modern MSA. Customers can take part in loyalty programs and earn or spend loyalty points and electronic vouchers. Furthermore, the MSA can suggest personalized recommendations even though the retailer cannot construct rich customer profiles. These profiles are managed on the smartphone and can be partially disclosed in order to get better, customized recommendations. Finally, we present an implementation called inShopnito, of which the security and performance is analyzed. In doing so, we show that it is possible to have a privacy-preserving MSA without having to sacrifice practicality