Effective design of electronic commerce environments: A proposed theory of congruence and an illustration

The advent of the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW) and its related technologies has created a new format of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) commerce; for instance, virtual shopping on the Internet within the B2C domain. Such a concept of shopping requires a new paradigm of commerce environments. Forecasts suggest that a major portion of total commerce in the U.S. during the early part of the next decade will be via the Net/WWW. While the concerns of lack of security and privacy associated with the Net still prevail these may have more to do with users perceptions than with inadequate technological capabilities. Concurrently, however, we posit that the current electronic commerce (EC) systems are not user-oriented leading to less than dramatic growth in B2C, In a physical environment, consumers can touch and feel the products and freely communicate with sellers or their representatives about the products they want to buy. On the contrary, consumers in an EC environment find it difficult to deal with the inherent nature of virtuality in their interaction. This is especially true in a poorly designed EC environment where users might be uncomfortable with the uncertainty and ambiguity caused by lack of interaction with products and sellers. For simple products this may not be a barrier whereas for complex products this may create a significant barrier. Very few theoretical frameworks exist in the EC literature that can effectively address the issue of design of Web-based EC application systems for this new form of cyber commerce environment and make provisions to deal with the heterogeneous nature of both products and consumers. In this study, we propose a conceptual framework to address such an issue by drawing on insights from contingency research in information systems design and media choice behavior. The basic theme of this model, called the congruence model, is that for an EC systems environment to have favorable impact on a consumer, the system must have a good fit with both the products/services that are sold/provided and the users it supports. An initial validity of this conceptual framework is demonstrated by working with a few product and user types. A detailed evaluation of eight different commercial web sites dealing with four different product categories provides additional support to the proposed theory. We expect our conceptual model to spur significant future research on this important phenomenon.