An Exploratory Study of Website Information Content

This study describes and demonstrates the Website Information Content Survey (WICS), which is intended to provide practitioners and researchers with a means of systematically describing website information content. In an exploratory survey of twenty business-to-consumer websites across five e-commerce domains, we demonstrate how the survey can be used to make cross-website comparisons that can identify potential gaps in a website’s information content. The results of this study offer actionable guidance to practitioners seeking to match their website’s information mix to customer’s demands for product, company, and channel information. The WICS tool enables future investigation of hypothesized relationships between website information content and user-website interaction outcomes.