Do online shops support customers' decision strategies by interactive information management tools? Results of an empirical analysis

This study describes a set of well-known decision strategies, and examines whether online shops provide interactive information management tools that support the application of these decision strategies. We examined the 100 largest online shops in North America in order to analyze their provided interactive information management tools. Results show that the online shops support decision strategies which are frequently used by customers (e.g., elimination-by-aspects strategy). In general, the supported decision strategies are qualitative and noncompensatory in nature. That is, customers applying such strategies compare values in their decision process, but do not involve summing, subtracting, and/or multiplying attribute values, and customers do also not make trade-offs among attribute values. Hence, compensating for a bad value on one attribute with a good value on another attribute is uncommon. We discuss implications of our results for online shop companies and developers of online shop systems.