Buyer Decision Support Systems and Search Agents for eCommerce Websites

In the rush to open their website, E-commerce sites too often fail to support buyer decision making and search, resulting in a loss of sale and the customer’s repeat business. This paper reviews why this occurs and the failure of many B2C and B2B website executives to understand that appropriate decision support and search technology can’t be fully bought off the shelf. Our contention is that significant investment and effort is required at any given website in order to create the decision support and search agents needed to properly support buyer decision making. We provide a framework to guide such effort (derived from buyer behavior choice theory); review the open problems that e-catalog sites pose to the framework and to existing search engine technology; discuss underlying design principles and guidelines; validate the framework and guidelines with a case study; and discuss lessons learned and steps needed to better support buyer decision behavior in the future. 1) Introduction The rapid rise of e-commerce is impressive – over half of today’s 80 million web users shop for or buy products online, and business to business purchasing is expected to rapidly eclipse that level [1]. However, in the rush to provide online presence, many emarket sites have been built quickly, with little infrastructure and capabilities needed to run such an e-business. As we all know only too well, browsing, searching, and buying via online web catalogs can be a time consuming, frustrating task. BCG, for example, reports that over 80% of web shoppers have at some point left e-markets without finding what they want and that 23% of all attempted e-shopping transactions end in failure [1]. Four of the top five failure modes are search-related (i.e., page loading times, couldn’t find product, system crashed, had to call customer service) although some of the blame needs to be shared by other causes as well, a few of which are internet delays, overall website design, and reliability.