Implications of buyer decision theory for design of e-commerce websites

In the rush to open their website, e-commerce sites too often fail to support buyer decision-making and search, resulting in a loss of sale and the customer's repeat business. This paper reviews why this occurs and the failure of many B2C and B2B website executives to understand that appropriate decision support and search technology cannot be fully bought off-the-shelf. Our contention is that significant investment and effort is required at any given website in order to create the decision support and search agents needed to properly support buyer decision-making. We provide a framework to guide such effort (derived from buyer behavior choice theory); review the open problems that e-catalog sites pose to the framework and to existing search engine technology; discuss underlying design principles and guidelines; validate the framework and guidelines with a case study; and discuss lessons learned and steps needed to better support buyer decision behavior in the future. Future needs are also pinpointed. (C) 2001 Academic Press.