How Well Do E-Commerce Web Sites Support Compensatory and Non-Compensatory Decision Strategies? An Exploratory Study

The burgeoning growth of online retailing is forcing businesses to provide better support for consumer decision making on e-commerce Web sites. Consequently, researchers in information systems and marketing have been focusing on investigating the effectiveness of Web-based decision support systems (WebDSS) in providing accurate and satisfying choices for customers. We consider WebDSS implementation based on compensatory, non-compensatory decision strategies and synthesize the existing literature. The results of synthesis show that compensatory WebDSS perform better than non-compensatory WebDSS in terms of decision quality, satisfaction, effort, and confidence. We then investigate the level of Web site support provided for consumers’ execution of compensatory and non-compensatory strategies. We examined 375 U.S.-based company Web sites and found that though moderate levels of support exists for consumers to implement non-compensatory choice strategies, virtually no support exists for executing multi-attributebased compensatory choice strategies.