Designed for success - empirical evidence on features of corporate Web pages

Abstract

We investigate how eight concepts derived from the media characteristics of the WWW impact corporate success in e-business if implemented as features of companies' Web sites. We construct a path model for testing our research hypotheses on three subsets of a representative survey of 1,308 cases, 469 general, 215 which target businesses (B2B), and 224 companies which target consumers (B2C). We find that information and functionality richness as well as keeping the site up to date are the key drivers of success for general companies. The key success factors for B2B-companies appear to be the interactive character of the site as well as keeping it up-to-date. B2C-companies can increase their success in e-business if their Web sites show content from a variety of media as well as if they are easy to navigate and readily accessible.