| The impact of the Internet and the World Wide Web on commerce has been immense. Business-to-consumer ecommerce, though relatively smaller, is still a large and fast growing segment of the economy with estimates of over 40 million households in the US alone buying online by the year 2003 (Rowen, 1999). The changes that electronic commerce has brought have been sweeping. We have new goods and services and new ways of selling them such as reverse auctions (Priceline.com) and international “yard sales” (Ebay and Half.com). Geographical and temporal boundaries have enabled consumers to buy anything from anywhere at anytime.; All these changes have happened at rapid speeds and new and old companies have struggled to stay afloat in this new volatile commercial space. One of the biggest challenges that e-stores have faced and continue to deal with is understanding their customers. While a lot is known about how consumers think and act in the brick-and-mortar world, there has not been enough time and effort put into understanding the electronic consumer.; In this thesis, we have combined the three reference disciplines of Information Systems, Marketing, and Psychology to help us understand online consumer behavior. We first developed a theoretical framework based on traditional consumer behavior research and environmental psychology. We also compared it to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) from the Information Systems field. We then performed three online field studies where we tested our framework and reached a set of conclusions and guidelines for better understanding of e-consumers and better e-store design that can lead to customer retention and higher sales. |
