| Electronic commerce use exploded in 1993 when the National Science Foundation, which maintained the Internet's U.S. fiber-optic backbone, changed its Acceptable Use Policy that prohibited the commercial use of the Internet. Now widely available, powerful and inexpensive World Wide Web information technology enables even small businesses to transform their communication, collaboration, and commerce in activities from customer service, marketing and promotion, to direct sales.; But across the “electronic table” from electronic commerce merchants' web pages, buyers face human limitations in the amount of information that they can use or pay attention to while making product decisions. These limitations prompt buyers to fashion search strategies, or patterns of search behaviors, in order to obtain enough product information with reasonable effort.; Previous research has suggested a network of variables that impact information search behaviors, which we divide into merchant controlled variables, and buyer controlled variables in this study. We set out to assess these variables' general influence together with those of individual research conditions in experiments where information search behavior was the primary focus.; From hierarchical linear models applied to meta-analytic data, we find that experimental conditions greatly impact our generalized measures of information search behavior, and suggest how these findings might strengthen or weaken several specific web page design precepts. |
