Effective design of electronic commerce environments: A proposed theory ofcongruence and an illustration

The advent of the Internet/World Wide Web (WWW) and its related technologie s has created a new format of business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-co nsumer (B2C) commerce; for instance, virtual shopping on the Internet withi n the B2C domain. Such a concept of shopping requires a new paradigm of com merce environments. Forecasts suggest that a major portion of total commerc e in the U.S. during the early part of the next decade will be via the Net/ WWW. While the concerns of lack of security and privacy associated with the Net still prevail these may have more to do with users perceptions than wi th inadequate technological capabilities. Concurrently, however, we posit t hat the current electronic commerce (EC) systems are not user-oriented lead ing to less than dramatic growth in B2C, In a physical environment, consume rs can touch and feel the products and freely communicate with sellers or t heir representatives about the products they want to buy. On the contrary, consumers in an EC environment find it difficult to deal with the inherent nature of virtuality in their interaction. This is especially true in a poo rly designed EC environment where users might be uncomfortable with the unc ertainty and ambiguity caused by lack of interaction with products and sell ers. For simple products this may not be a barrier whereas for complex prod ucts this may create a significant barrier. Very few theoretical frameworks exist in the EC literature that can effectively address the issue of desig n of Web-based EC application systems for this new form of cyber commerce e nvironment and make provisions to deal with the heterogeneous nature of bot h products and consumers. In this study, we propose a conceptual framework to address such an issue by drawing on insights from contingency research i n information systems design and media choice behavior. The basic theme of this model, called the congruence model, is that for an EC systems environm ent to have favorable impact on a consumer, the system must have a good fit with both the products/services that are sold/provided and the users it su pports. An initial validity of this conceptual framework is demonstrated by working with a few product and user types. A detailed evaluation of eight different commercial web sites dealing with four different product categori es provides additional support to the proposed theory. We expect our concep tual model to spur significant future research on this important phenomenon .