Many new owners are leery of purchasing items over the Internet. Alarmists would have us believe that credit card numbers are routinely plundered en route to online vendors. In truth, it’s much easier for someone to tap your phone line and listen as you place a call to catalog retailer than it is to intercept and decode credit card data that you send to an online retailer.
It’s far more important to ask “Can I trust this vendor to sell me a quality product and ship it as soon as possible?” Learning to evaluate an online retailer will help you avoid trouble. The first rule of online shopping is to look for vendor names you recognize and trust—vendors that advertise on television and in magazines, for example. You should also take into account the retailer’s web site. Larger, more reputable retailers often have well designed sites since they can afford a dedicated designer and web support staff. Smaller retailers are often identifiable by poor page design (including gaudy background patterns) and slow load times. You can’t always judge a book by its cover, however. Small Mom-and-Pop vendors may have poor design but offer impeccable service. If you’re apprehensive about the retailer, look for its customer service telephone number and give them a call. If there is no phone number listed, look for another vendor.
The next issue to consider is the retailer’s shipping and return policies. Most vendors charge for shipping, offering you a choice of several shipping methods. In-stock items are usually packaged and sent either overnight, or for two-day or three-day delivery. Return policies vary from retailer to retailer. At a minimum, you should choose a retailer that allows you to return your product for immediately replacement if it is damaged. Try to find an online vendor that offers a satisfaction guarantee. This allows you to return the product if you change your mind or if you simply aren’t satisfied with the item.
While making purchase decisions, consumers are often unable to evaluate all available alternatives in great depth and, thus, tend to use two-stage processes to reach their decisions. At the first stage, consumers typically screen a large set of available products and identify a subset of the most promising alternatives. Subsequently, they evaluate the latter in more depth, perform relative comparisons across products on important attributes, and make a purchase decision. Given the different tasks to be performed in such a two-stage process, interactive tools that provide support to consumers in the following respects are particularly valuable: (1) the initial screening of available products to determine which ones are worth considering further, and (2) the in-depth comparison of selected products before making the actual purchase decision. This paper examines the effects of two decision aids, each designed to assist consumers in performing one of the above tasks, on purchase decision making in an online store.
The first interactive tool, a recommendation agent (RA), allows consumers to more efficiently screen the (potentially very large) set of alternatives available in an online shopping environment. Based on self-explicated information about a consumer’s own utility function (attribute importance weights and minimum acceptable attribute levels), the RA generates a personalized list of recommended alternatives. The second decision aid, a comparison matrix (CM), is designed to help consumers make in-depth comparisons among selected alternatives. The CM allows consumers to organize attribute information about multiple products in an alternatives x attributes matrix and to have alternatives sorted by any attribute.
