This assignment is designed to give you skills in evaluating retailers using e-commerce to reach, inform, and sell to consumers. Here is your job: You and your consulting team have been selected to develop a set of “Best Practices” for a specific industry.  In order to do so, you will read background literature (on library reserve) that provides some existing benchmarks used in from the industry’s point of view as well as the consumers’ points of view. You will propose a set of benchmarks that are most relevant to your industry. You will then examine a sample of retail online sites, analyzing and scoring them on those web characteristics that you have chosen. You will then present your findings, the ranking of each retailers, and recommendations for the future.
 

1. Beginning of Paper
a.  Title Page, plus list of group members
b.  Table of Contents with page numbers
c. Introduction:  First, provide a 1-2 page overview of the use of e-commerce in retailing, problems and issues that currently face retailers who do, and current web use estimates.
 

2. Background for your paper:  What have experts found about web design? What do we know that consumers prefer?  Read the online reserve articles for background. Include others that you feel relate to your specific industry.

a. Consumer Preferences and Web Use: First, discuss the importance of understanding consumer preferences in building web sites for retail purposes. Do all consumers want the same thing? Do web users prefer different characteristics based on their levels of experience in using the web? Do they differ by age, gender, or some other predictable characteristic?

b. Overview of Your Industry:  What are current trends in the industry that you have selected? Are retailers more likely to offer your products on the web, in the bricks and mortar setting, or in some combination of channel types?  Are there current problems? Are there new technologies that are likely to improve e-commerce for your industry? (Business and Industry is likely to be a useful source to answer this question).

c. Using the readings as a starting point, discuss and describe how web testing has been done in industry and in academia today. Present background on what is known today about web design for retail purposes.  At least 5 reserve articles must be used at a minimum.Use citations!
 

3. Methodology:

a. Select a representative sample of sites from your industry that offer the individual customer the opportunity to make an online purchase. Your sample should include 20 sites. Some may be specialty sites that focus on your industry, while others may be parts of general merchandise retailers, such as apparel, home décor, or electronics sold at Sears. Describe your logic in selecting the sites to include in your sample.

b. Based on your readings, personal preferences, and examination of the sites, propose a list of 20 attributes that customers would reasonably expect to find in sites that sell products in your industry. List these and give a brief description of each. Such characteristics might include site maps, site customization, price lists, international sales, shipping information, order status, features, pictures, warranties, and so forth. There may be very specific characteristics that are particular to your industry, such as book ratings, virtual clothing models, electronics demos, freshness guarantees, and color palettes.

c. Attribute number 20 for all groups will be accessibility for persons with disabilities.  Please run the home page of the site through accessibility via the BOBBY web site found at this URL:  http://bobby.watchfire.com/bobby/html/en/index.jsp.  Print out the accessibility report for each site and include it in the appendix. You can divide the sites among yourselves for this specific attribute.

d. Each of you should individually rank each site on each of the characteristics that you have developed. Each group member should provide their own set of rankings (include in Appendix). Use a simple five-point scale to rate each best practice in your list, where 5 = very good, 4 = good, 3 = satisfactory, 2 =  fair,
and 1 = poor, 0 = none.

Each Student prepares their own chart.                      Your assigned score for each attribute

Retailers	1	2	3	4															19	20
Amazon
Borders
B&N
Retailer #20
Overall Average

4. Results

a. Analysis:  now compile the average scores from all the students in your group.  An EXCEL file will be provided for your use.

                               The group averages all the scores to prepare a chart of the group average for each attribute.

Retailers	1	2	3	4											19	20
Amazon
Borders
B&N
Retailer #20
Overall  Average

b. Calculate an overall group average for each attribute. How does each retailer compare to that average?  Who is above? Who is below?

c. Create a score for each retailer that is a simple index of how many attributes scored “good” or “very good”. For instance, Retailer A may score good/vg on 15 attributes, while Retailer B may score good/vg on only 7 attributes. Those with the highest rating are your best performers with best practices.

d. Analyze your data. Which retailers were the best performers? The worst? The middle?  Describe what you have found. Does this match what you expected?

Note:  you can compute averages across worksheets by using EXCEL. Each student fills in a separate worksheet. All averages across worksheets can be computer on the last worksheet. We will go over this in class.
 

5. Conclusion:  Provide a set of recommendations for retailers in general related to various web designs and the importance of testing alternative formats.

a.  Based on your data, what do you recommend for retailers in your industry that want to develop or improve their web sites?

b. What are the limitations of this study? What else could have been included to improve the reliability and validity of your findings?

c.  Suppose you were going to extend your analysis to different types of consumers – e.g. that attributes preferred by experienced consumers were different from those preferred by experienced consumers. How would you do this?

6. Contribution:  Finally, discuss the skills that you have built by participating in this assignment.

7. References with correct citations

8. List of web addresses of your sample

9. Appendices:  Any charts, your rankings
 

Possible ranking criteria that I’ve used in my research, built on Eroglu’s work.  In this research, consumers were asked to rate the following web site characteristics according to their degree of helpfulness to you on a scale of 1 to 5, where 5 is very helpful and 1 is not helpful at all.

    Not helpful                     Very helpful

1.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Pictures of products
2.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Use of color as background on site
3.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Colors used to highlight specific information
4.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Guides to links within the site
5.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Explanation of security information
6.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Indication of secure connection
7.       1 ---2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Links to similar sites
8.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to search on the site (the site has its own search engine)
9.       1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Shopping cart for gathering products
10.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Special price promotions
11.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to download software updates
12.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Music on site
13.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Size of print
14.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Estimated delivery dates
15.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Design of site map
16.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Product comparison information
17.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Company history
18.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Links to online help
19.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Telephone numbers to use for assistance
20.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Company addresses
21.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to email the company directly from the site
22.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Similarity of web site with merchandise in actual stores
23.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to use credit cards on the site
24.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to compute shipping information for each product
25.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Explanation of terms of sale
26.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Written text descriptions of products
27.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Color charts of products (if applicable)
28.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Comments by other customers
29.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Chat rooms with other customers
30.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Rankings by other customers
31.     1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Explanation of return policies
32.      1--- 2 --- 3 --- 4 --- 5     Ability to return merchandise to actual stores