A framework for understanding human factors in web-based electronic commerce

The World Wide Web and email are used increasingly for purchasing and selling products. The use of the internet for these functions represents a significant departure from the standard range of information retrieval and communication tasks for which it has most often been used. Electronic commerce should not be assumed to be information retrieval, it is a separate task-domain, and the software systems that support it should be designed from the perspective of its goals and constraints. At present there are many different approaches to the problem of how to support seller and buyer goals using the internet. They range from standard, hierarchically arranged, hyperlink pages to "electronic sales assistants", and from text-based pages to 3D virtual environments. In this paper, we briefly introduce the electronic commerce task from the perspective of the buyer, and then review and analyse the technologies. A framework is then proposed to describe the design dimensions of electronic commerce. We illustrate how this framework may be used to generate additional, hypothetical technologies that may be worth further exploration. (C) 2000 Academic Press.