FöRFATTARE
Jamshidi, Bahador

INSTITUTION
Industriell ekonomi och samhällsvetenskap / Industriell marknadsföring och e-handel

SAMMANFATTNING
Business-to-business (B2B) e-Commerce has grown up both in diversity and transacted money value in recent years and this trend is expected to remain in future. Websites as one of the most important mediums play role as a primary interface between companies and their stakeholders that in this study (focused on B2B websites) are other businesses. To know what users want in a website is an important area of study and nowadays it is receiving lots of attention among practitioners and academics from different and diversified backgrounds. Website usability is an area of interest for website designers, computer scientists, psychologist, and marketers and so on. The complexity of business-to-business relationships makes it more vital to inspect B2B website usability from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The previous researches in this area lack such a way of looking to this problem either with being so empirical or theoretical. The purpose of this thesis is to identify the factors that shape B2B websites usability with a consideration of multiple sides of the usability of B2B websites.

Using the qualitative tools of MECA (Means-End Chain Analysis) and its associated interview technique of laddering has provided a deeper analysis of the decision making processes while using a B2B website. The results suggest that all technical features in design of a website will be evaluated through four values of “Time”, “Cost”, “Trust” and “Independence” by business users. These findings can be used to develop new measurements for evaluation of the usability of B2B websites as well as preparing bases for redefining B2B usability.

ISSN 1653-0187 / ISRN LTU-PB-EX--08/011--SE / NR 2008:011