Web designers and providers are keenly interested in determining the ideal range of Web site complexity to facilitate user–Web site interactions. Previous empirical findings have sparked a lively ...debate about whether Web site complexity inhibits or enhances user responses toward the Web site. This paper develops a theoretical framework that posits that complexity effects shift along a sequence of evaluation criteria depending on the overall intensity and type of Web site complexity. The first experimental study confirms the suggested interaction effect of the overall degree of complexity and the sequence of evaluation criteria: the optimum is lower for upstream criteria (e.g., ease of navigation) and higher for downstream criteria (e.g., attitude toward the Web site). The second experiment distinguishes two dimensions of complexity (structural vs. visual) that evoke the antipodal effects underlying the shift in the optimal range of complexity. The paper also outlines avenues for further research and implications for marketing practitioners.
•We disentangle the contradictory findings of previous research on Web site complexity.•Study 1 shows how Web site complexity and the evaluation criteria interact.•The curvilinear effect shifts along the sequence of evaluation criteria.•Study 2 scrutinizes the antipodal effects of structural and visual complexity.•Marketers should care about the ideal level and the type of web site complexity.
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2.
Why did I buy this? Jacobsen, Stephanie
Journal of research in interactive marketing,
10/2018, Volume:
12, Issue:
3
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Purpose
This paper aims to develop a link between word-of-mouth and attribution of credit or blame following a purchase. Attribution is important because it can affect repurchase behavior, loyalty ...and word-of-mouth; therefore, understanding who receives credit or blame for a purchase outcome following a product recommendation is critical.
Design/methodology/approach
Through three studies, how recommendation context affects attribution of credit or blame to consumers, reviewers and retailers is experimentally examined. These studies test the thesis that context factors that are independent of the product recommendation can affect how consumers assign responsibility for the product’s performance.
Findings
Results demonstrate that while consumers trust online reviews, the addition of reviewer incentives diminish that trust, especially when a consumer identifies with the retailer. Findings show support for retailers using online reviews and provide evidence for using caution when incentivizing reviewers.
Research limitations/implications
This study makes a theoretical connection between word-of-mouth (reviews) and attribution. As this connection is not seen often in the literature, future research should look at the role the recommender plays in the purchasing process. This study forced participants to attribute a purchase success/failure to certain parties to find a baseline with which to begin. Future studies should look at this process as more spontaneous. It may not always occur or possibly only occur for certain types of purchases or experiences.
Practical implications
Retailers should be continuing to use online reviews as they provide protection from blame and an increase in credit for successful outcomes. This study also provides evidence that incorporating social media into online reviews as many sites have been doing may actually backfire. While it might be more helpful to the consumer, it can increase blame to the retailer. Reviewers are receiving incentives more frequently, and this study finds that loyal consumers should not be shown incentivized reviews as it heightens blame after a negative outcome.
Social implications
While attribution has been found to be an important part of the purchasing process, it has not been looked at in relationship to word-of-mouth/electronic word-of-mouth (offline/online reviews). Knowing that who recommends a product to us impacts post-purchase behavior is important, as online reviews are utilized more frequently. Many social media strategies have been implemented without information as to how the retailer themselves will be impacted. This study provides evidence of how to better utilize online reviews.
Originality/value
Though online reviews have been studied widely, less is known about how reviews and product recommendations affect attribution of credit or blame for a post-purchase outcome. The theoretical link between word-of-mouth and product outcome attribution provided here will help guide future research in this area.
The globalization of economic activities has led multinational business-to-business (B2B) firms to use their corporate web sites extensively to communicate with their stakeholders. Using a field ...study of 368 business customers, this paper examines three factors of information that influence corporate web sites' effectiveness in a B2B context and whether these factors differ by web site user's national origin. Results indicate that informativeness of a corporate web site is important for both North American and European visitors. Quality of information is important for European users but not an important aspect for North American users. Usability is the most important factor for North American users but it is not important for European users. Implications of these results are discussed for managerial practices and further research.
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Behavioral actions of online customers play an important role in influencing the website's effectiveness for online retailers and online business entities. The leading web analytics software measures ...the customers' behavior on a website using many key web metrics. However, the role of key metrics in measuring the dynamics nature of website effectiveness has largely been unexplored, especially for the non-transactional website. The study builds on flow theory to fill this gap. It presents a methodology to predict the website's effectiveness by examining the impact of three metrics (average session duration, repeat visit, and bouncing rate) on consumers' online behavioral outcomes witnessed through goal completion (GC) and goal conversion rate (GCR). Vector autoregressive (VAR) method is adopted to analyze the dynamic relations and effect among the metrics. The study provides an in-depth insight into the time-varying effect of each variable on website performance. The findings reveal that an engaged customer with high ASD (average session duration) or who revisits (RV) the site positively impacts GC and GCR. A negative effect of bouncing rate (BR) was found on goal conversion rate and goal completion. Interestingly, the study found granger causality between GC and GCR & ASD, and RV. Based on the findings, the study provides vital theoretical and managerial implications.
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The internet has been used by individuals, organizations, and governments for business, sports, health, banking, advertisement, education, and other services. Many websites have been developed and ...designed in the last several decades. However, most have not been developed and designed according to a shared set of design standards. Consequently, there is a need for an approach to evaluate the effectiveness of a website. A literature review was conducted to develop such an approach. Four experts were then consulted to inspect and evaluate the approach, and a questionnaire was completed by three categories: Internet users, website developers, and others to determine its final version. This research resulted in the development of an approach to evaluate website effectiveness, composed of three major criteria: design, content, and functionality, and 17 sub-criteria. The significance of this new approach is that it allows stakeholders to evaluate their websites and determine how to improve them in order to achieve their vision and mission.
The objective of much promotional material is to create attitudes about a product or service with existing and prospective consumers. The effectiveness of the promotion in generating such attitudes ...is partly dependent upon the ability of these actual and prospective consumers to process the information provided in the promotional material, which then impacts on their decision. The aim of this research is to analyze the effectiveness of a promotional website under different information load conditions, for consumers from countries that differ in their digital information literacy. To achieve this goal, an experiment was conducted which was designed to manage the amount of information shown to participants from two different countries (the United Kingdom and Spain). The results suggest that both the main and interaction effect of information load and digital literacy have an impact on a website’s effectiveness. This implies that promotional websites need to be not only culturally but also cognitively adapted.
This study attempts to apply the ICTRT (information, communication, transaction, relationship and technical merit) model to assess the effectiveness of US official state tourism websites through ...content analysis by expert evaluators. The results demonstrated that US State Tourism Offices (STOs) were not able to effectively adopt and manage information technology to support more sophisticated business operations. Most STOs focused mainly on basic website functions, such as information and communication. Applications supporting more advanced functions, such as transaction and relationship building were not being widely deployed. In addition, an inverse, curvilinear relationship was found between website complexity and website performance. Suggestions and implications were provided and discussed based on the research findings.
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•We model users’ navigation behavior as a Markov process and represent it using a transition probability matrix.•We define a metric called implied deviation to measure contextual ...relevance from designer’s perspective.•Propose deviation minimization framework to improve the contextual relevance from user as well as designer point of views.•We provide note to practitioner which can help them identify potential of proposed framework better.•Proposed framework is applied to two real access log data sets from a university examination website.
Identification and sorting of contextually relevant links are important for navigation design of responsive websites. While average click ratio is often used as a metric to evaluate contextual relevance of navigation structure from users’ view, we propose a metric called implied deviation to quantify the same from designer point of view. Average click ratio minimization problem typically solved using meta-heuristics has issues such as loss of designer-defined contextual relevance and loss of connectivity among webpages. To solve this problem, we propose a deviation minimization framework to suggest context-preserving navigation structure. The proposed framework consists of three stages. Stage 1 models user navigation behavior as a Markov process and generates a transition probability matrix. Then we use the transition probabilities as weights to relax the original average click ratio minimization problem, and bring it to a form similar to a transportation model. The corresponding solution is considered as the initial basic feasible solution of the original problem. In Stage 2, transition probability guided meta-heuristics improve upon the initial basic feasible solution. Specifically, we use modified simulated annealing and ant colony optimization algorithms. This resulting solution is further weighted with transition probabilities to make a tradeoff in Stage 3. We obtained experimental results based on two education and university-related datasets to show that the proposed framework can achieve a good tradeoff for contextual relevance in terms of both the average click ratio and implied deviation.
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In this study, we propose and test a conceptual model, representing the
hedonic–utilitarian dual mediation hypothesis, in which both cognition and emotions are combined to help understand individual ...behavior in an online environment. Beyond what cognitive models offer, our results show that both cognitive and emotional responses play a key role in communication through websites and that the hedonic–utilitarian dual mediation hypothesis is the best fitting model in comparison with the four alternatives tested. Moreover, attitude is treated as a bi-dimensional construct made up of a hedonic and a utilitarian component. Based on this, an additional contribution concerns the correspondence that exists between consumer cognition and the utilitarian dimension of attitude, as well as the emotions expressed by subjects and the hedonic dimension of attitude. The relative importance of each dimension of attitudes can provide marketers in e-commerce settings with insights about whether to introduce more emotional appeals or more cognitive stimuli when communicating through their websites.
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Background and Objectives:
In order to assess website content effectiveness (WCE), investigations have to be made into whether the reception of website contents leads to a change in the ...characteristics of website visitors or not. Because randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are not always the method of choice, researchers may have to follow other strategies such as using retrospective pretest methodology (RPM), a straightforward and easy-to-implement tool for estimating intervention effects. This article aims to introduce RPM in the context of website evaluation and test its viability under experimental conditions.
Method:
Building on the idea that RCTs deliver unbiased estimates of the true causal effects of website content reception, I compared the performance of RPM with that of an RCT within the same study. Hence, if RPM provides effect estimates similar to those of the RCT, it can be considered a viable tool for assessing the effectiveness of the website content features under study.
Results and Conclusions:
RPM was capable of delivering comparatively resilient estimates of the effects of a YouTube video and a text feature on knowledge and attitudes. With regard to all of the outcome variables considered, the differences between the sizes of the effects estimated by the RCT and RPM were not significant. Additionally, RPM delivered relatively accurate effect size estimates in most of the cases. Therefore, I conclude that RPM could be a viable alternative for assessing WCE in cases where RCTs are not the preferred method.
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