E-consumption : Website features' influence on the purchasing decision

Sammanfattning: During the past two decades, as internet has spread across the world, bringing people and businesses closer, e-commerce has been on a rapid expansion. To be a part of the expanding market, businesses have put a lot of effort to understand consumer behavior online, and to adapt. E-commerce differs drastically from traditional stores in the way that consumers are able to browse commercial web shops in search for the desired product, without outside influence. To understand how customers behave when purchasing a product, the Dewey model, customer buying process, is used. This process consists of five steps, which are: need recognition, information retrieval, information evaluation, buying decision and evaluation. However, within e-commerce, the web shops are the only platform where the business have the opportunity to affect the customers, as there are no salespersons to affect customers’ decisions as in traditional stores. As the web shop is platform for communication within e-commerce, it increases the importance for businesses to understand how their visitors react to features on their web shops. Visual features of websites, such as color and layout, can be crucial when a potential customer makes a purchase. The purpose of this study is to see how several visual features affect the purchasing behavior throughout Dewey’s model, customer buying process.The findings and analysis shows that some features are valued higher from each other, some are dependent on each other, and some are being taken for granted. First impression, product information and purchase methods, are among the crucial moments throughout the buying process. Our test conducted shows that the different features have different impact throughout the buying process.