Web Systems Design and Online Consumer Behavior [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

The Road Ahead

Foreseen trends for the e-Commerce domain and more
specifically for the design of electronic product catalogs and shopping carts, comply with the
technological directions adapted for the design of Web applications in general. Nowadays, there is
a strong current towards Web usability and UCD and at the same time, more and more e-Shops deliver
personalized services in an effort to better address each individual user. The last years,
personalization has been implemented in e-Commerce environments
in the form of product recommendations, usually placed on product pages (Markellos et al., 2003).
This has restricted the real potential of this technology which hasn’t reached the catalog or the
shopping cart (with the exception of only a few carts that actually embody product
recommendations). The fact is that product catalogs may dramatically benefit from the deployment of
personalization techniques (Yen & Kong, 2002), as in essence, what a catalog typically has to
address is information overload in large e-Shops and the way to access the information of interest
(or product(s) of interest to be more specific). One way to solve this problem is to provide a
customized catalog for each customer. However, before any customization can be done, it is first
required to collect data about the customers, in order to decide what the customized (or
personalized) view of the catalog should be like. Such data regard personal information including
demographics and preferences entered explicitly by customers during registration, or in more
advanced settings, data on user navigational behavior (Web usage mining) and history of buying
behavior recorded and analyzed for the decision making process that will output the personalized
shopping experience. Personalization on the Web may take up various forms (Markellou et al., 2005).
As regards the use of the catalog, there can be personalized content (in terms of both available
categories and products inside categories), personalized structuring (referring to the hierarchy of
categories), and personalized presentation (in the sense that product listing pages can be
customized according to personal preferences and present for each item only the attributes selected
by the specific customer).

Moreover, intelligent agents may be deployed for offering personalized assistance during
product browsing, that can even take up the form of an animated (and even talking) character. Such
approaches have proven quite successful as people like interacting with a “virtual seller” rather
than browsing through successive, passive Web pages. Another fascinating factor that should be
considered when discussing Web personalization is the development of the semantic Web and the new
potential it is expected to offer to all knowledge discovery and decision making tasks (customer
profiling, product and price comparisons, etc.).

The prevalence of Web marketing is another point to
consider. Web advertising, personalized marketing, one-to-one customer relationships, special
pricing based on buying history, all give e-Shops new and stronger potential to expand the customer
base and increase sales, while developing e-loyalty. Marketing on the Web is easy and cost
effective, and is expected to grow (even more). Product catalogs and shopping carts may well
incorporate advertising both directly (banners, links, photos, special offers, etc.) or indirectly
(recommendations, ratings, etc.).

Product catalogs and shopping carts reside at the heart of e-Shops and are the components
that concentrate most of the implementation team efforts, and they are the first to be influenced
by latest advances in the technological field. A hazard to be avoided is the exaggeration or over
optimism in selecting the technological solutions to be used during implementation. It is probably
the last guideline of this chapter but it is a crucial one: the technologies to be deployed during
product catalog and shopping cart implementation should be restricted to the mature and reliable
ones that users are familiar with. If a catalog requires the user to install a special purpose
player in order to view its contents, then the e-Shop degrades the user experience in terms of
speed, ease and usability. Not mentioning the case where the user fails or refuses to acquire and
install the player and abandons the e-Shop. Thus before anything, the designer of an e-Shop must
ensure ease of use because “ease of use may be invisible, but its absence
certainly isn’t invisible” (Vredenburg et al., 2002, p. 23).