The website is a central component of E-commerce that is interconnected to internal and external entities that influence its design. There are few guidelines on how to design and develop an effective website. This study focuses on determination of required functions, features and characteristics that drive the design of storefront type websites. First, the study discusses design goals from the viewpoint of the firm and the customer. Next, website functionalities that serve the goals are identified and described using e-commerce and decision support literature. Then graduate business students evaluate seven actual storefront websites in terms of presence and quality of required functions using a likert scale in the evaluation process. Results show that most sites provide the required basic functionalities. However, most sites do not support functionalities such as product customization, negotiation, international service, personalization, decisional guidance and adaptiveness that can potentially lead to competitive advantage over the brick and mortar stores.
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