| Nowadays people pay a lot of attention to healthy lifestyles and are concerned with product quality, particularly food quality and food safety. People are eager to get more information about the production process and product quality in order to dissipate anxiety and fear of product safety issues, and enhance their confidence in the products they buy. Traceability systems are one of such management information systems designed to manage the traceable information related to individual products over the entire product lifecycle, including raw material supply, production, transportation, marketing and consumption. Such systems were designed or built by producer companies or third-party, driven and regulated by the government. An important issue is that consumers often do not have access to the information inside of the traceability systems. Recently, there appear several consumer-oriented online traceability systems/websites. This study is designed to investigate the current status of traceability websites, with respect to their information attributes and associated presentation methods and compare those with users' preferences for such traceability information, thus providing suggestions for the design of traceability websites. To address this research goal, this study first examines the current situation of seven online traceability websites, and summarized the information attributes (specific-product-level, product-level, and company-level) and information types (factual, descriptive and evaluative information) provided by these websites. Second, this study distributes an online survey to a sample of consumers in United States, asking their preferences for traceability information and associated information types at different purchase stages. Third, this study compares the current state of traceability websites with users' preferences and provides suggestions for the design of traceability websites. The results reveal that consumers prefer product-level information most and expect that traceability websites could help evaluate product quality. It is also found that lack of time before purchase and lack of government's regulations were consumers' major concerns with respect to their hesitation when using traceability websites. Further, the results have theoretical implications for understanding the relationship between traceability websites and their users, and also provide recommendations for the better design of traceability websites in the future. |
