Website Attractiveness in E-Commerce Sites: Key Factors Influencing the Consumer Purchase Decision

Abstract

Website attractiveness has become the essence of online business and bringing in more customer base. Website attracting variables play a key role enhancing the online purchase among the consumers. Key website attracting variables influencing consumer purchase decision include: Services & Offers, Ease of Use (Usability) and Concerns & Issues. Services & Offers: The consumers are attracted by the services and offers that a website provides to its users. The higher the services and offers provided by a website, the more will be the attractiveness to its users. The services and offers play a vital role as an attracting force to influence consumers in their purchasing decision. Ease of Use (Usability) is redefined as trade-off between increasing the user's motivation to encourage exploration and purchasing in e-commerce, and the costs of usability errors (Sutcliffe, 2002). The perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use are the two main factors on which usability counts. The quality of the website is also determined by its usability i.e. the perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use to the customer. Concerns & Issues: The eradication of trust in Internet commerce applications may cause prudent business operators and clients to forgo use of the Internet for now and revert back to traditional methods of doing business. This loss of trust is being fueled by continued stories of hacker attacks on e-commerce sites and consumer data privacy abuse. Credibility can be defined as believability. Credible information is believable information. In discussing the credibility of an e-commerce site we will aim at the reliability of the information given about the products and services. The following study aims at analyzing the website attractiveness factors of Concerns & Issues, Services & Offers and Ease of Use (Usability) influencing the consumer purchasing decision. It also aims at finding the importance of these afro mentioned variables in attracting and winning over the consumer in the highly competitive Internet marketplace. A survey of focus group of participants who were regular users of E-commerce websites like E-Bay, Yebhi, and Snapdeal etc. helped in creating a web management score.