Evaluation of the credibility of internet shopping in the UK

Abstract

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to examine the credibility of internet shopping. Credibility, which refers to the believability of information, is an important consideration of internet shopping.Design/methodology/approachThe evaluation is conducted by incorporating Fogg's 10 Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility into Nielsen's heuristic evaluation. Furthermore, security and individualisation are considered as additional heuristics. Evaluation criteria are developed based on these 12 heuristics. Three UK car insurance web sites are selected for evaluation, including the AA, Norwich Union and Tesco.FindingsThe results show that the Norwich Union site seems to be the most credible while the Tesco site appears to be the least credible. The most significant credibility problems are found to lie in the areas of “trustworthiness”, “expertise” and “real‐world feel”. In other words, these three areas are key issues for future improvement of these sites.Originality/valueThis paper contributes to the literature by providing a set of credibility design guidelines, which can be used to support the improved development of future internet shopping designs, especially car insurance web sites.

E-Commerce Credibility in Saudi Arabia : Consumer Perspective

“…Of the two evaluation methods used, the heuristic evaluation method is the easier, quicker, and more effective in terms of identifying potential problems, and it has been used in numerous studies [6,7,20,22]. The heuristic evaluation method requires the evaluators to identify the interface problems against a set of heuristics, guidelines or design principles.…”

“…Furthermore, while the method can be conducted by a single evaluator, its effectiveness and improvement increase with the number of evaluators [23]. Fogg's 10 Stanford credibility guidelines [24] has been widely used in evaluating the credibility of websites, and a number of studies have tested it and confirm its usefulness [7,20,22]. These guidelines each describe a specific element of a website, and when using them in credibility evaluations, they help the evaluator focus on that specific element of website design to identify the credibility problem.…”

“…(3) The information is complete and accurate. [6,9,10,22,25,26] G2. Demonstration of the existence of the real organisation behind the website (4) The site displays the company's membership with the Chamber of Commerce.…”

E-commerce Platform Acceptance

“…It involves the large amount of product information which increases not only choice, but indecision based on unwillingness to accept the product on the basis of what they read or see online as pointed out by Oxley and Yeung (2001) as well as Hart et al (2000). Hence as these researchers say, two main advantages of online shopping-rich product choice and information may become a great challenge to customers to overcome (Huang 2003) as they may question the objective source and quality of product information or find it biased (Clewley et al 2009). …”

“…Moreover Manstead adds that cultural variations have significant impact on the way people view the world which eventually affects behaviour. Therefore it seems to be obvious that Effortless purchase of products (minimum effort) (Brow et al 2003) Product features uncertainty (Stankiewicz and Millo 2004a) Minimum time investment (Monsuwe et al 2004) Lack of consumer control over purchase (Lee and Turban 2001) Convenience (opportunity to order product 24 h a day 7 days a week (Augustyniak 2002) Interpersonal nature of the transaction process (Stankiewicz and Millo 2004a) Reduction of psychological cost of shopping (Jayawardhena and Wright 2009) Lack of subjective product information (Ward and Lee 1999) Access to wide variety of products (Zhou et al 2007) Uncertainty of source and quality of product information (Clewley et al 2009) Greater amount of detailed information (Oxley and Yeung 2001) Personal information system security (Turner and Callaghan 2006) Comparison of product features, availability and prices (Hart et al 2000) Lack of assistance and direct interaction with sales staff (Stankiewicz and Millo 2004) Lower price (Chodak 2008) Financial transaction system security (Gibbs et al 2002) knowing and understanding cultural context is crucial for the business as different cultural backgrounds will respond differently to e-commerce strategy as culture greatly influences the way consumers behave. In order to investigate cultural differences scholars have developed a number of frameworks.…”