Responses to a questionnaire indicate that Web users have household incomes approaching $60,000; expect to buy electronics, computers, software and other high-priced items; and are willing to pay for quality information at a reasonable price.
COMPUTER HARDWARE and software vendors -- as well as companies offering travel, investing and similar services -- should use the World Wide Web to provide information to the growing number of potential customers seeking on-line product information there, says a researcher who has studied consumer attitudes of more than 4,500 Web users.
The research suggests companies should be using the Web to provide detailed and comprehensive information to encourage the sale of products and services at traditional locations such as retail outlets. Companies expecting consumers to make extensive on-line purchases may be disappointed -- at least for now.
"Currently, people are more interested in using the Web as an information resource than in using it to actually make purchases," says James Pitkow, a Georgia Institute of Technology researcher who analyzed responses to a set of questionnaires posted on the Web last fall. "Web users want to gather information about new computer hardware and software, music, books, the weather and available travel resources on-line. For them, the Web is an information retrieval tool for up-to-date data."
Companies should therefore pay close attention to the quality of the information they make available electronically. Providing valuable and current information provides a "hook" that draws users to Web sites, notes Dr. Laurie Hodges, a research scientist in the Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI).
"The people who will be commercially successful on the Web will be those who can put up the best information," explains Hodges, who is collaborating with Pitkow to study Web usage and trends. "It is important for companies to update and change the information at their Web sites frequently to keep people coming back."
Though heavily weighted toward persons whose occupations give them easy access to the Internet, users of the World Wide Web have household incomes approaching $60,000, expect to buy electronics, computers, software and other high-priced items, and are willing to pay for quality information at a reasonable price. That makes them prime prospects for many types of businesses.
These conclusions are based on detailed demographic information gathered from a widely advertised questionnaire posted on the World Wide Web between October 10 and November 16, 1994. Because the respondents were not randomly selected from the population of Web users, the information lacks the rigor of a true scientific survey.
However, the data collected by Pitkow and Mimi Recker in Georgia Tech's Graphics, Visualization and Usability (GVU) Center provides one of the best available pictures of who is using the rapidly growing hypermedia system that provides hypertext, graphics, photographs and movies to users throughout the world.
The data and an experimental set of questions, collected in "GVU's 2nd WWW User Survey," was analyzed with help from Sunil Gupta at the University of Michigan School of Business.
A third survey made available April 10 through May 10 solicited responses
from Web users about additional consumer areas. Results of the third survey will be
available after June 10 at
Among the key results of the second survey:
Nearly 80 percent of respondents said
they would be willing to pay for
information on the Web if the quality and price were right. Only 20 percent said
they would not pay for services under any conditions.
Noncommercial World Wide Web
sources were deemed more important
than direct mail advertising and brochures for obtaining product information. Only
traditional print media was used more by the respondents.
More than two-thirds of the respondents
said they had sought information
about higher-priced computer software and hardware through the Web during the
past six months. More than a third of the respondents reported using the Web to
find on-line information about home electronics, movies and videos, music and
books.
Though 70 percent of the respondents
obtained information about
higher-priced computer hardware on line, only 13 percent made purchases there.
Traditional retail outlets are still where Web users said they ultimately purchased the
products they chose.
Browsing, entertainment and education
are the top three reasons the
respondents cited for using the Web. Next in order were work-related uses, academic
research and business research. Just 8 percent said they used the Web for
shopping.
Seventy percent of the respondents have
college degrees, more than a third
at the master's or doctoral level.
Estimated average household income is
$59,600, though 13 percent of the
respondents said their household income was greater than $100,000. North
American users were more affluent than their European counterparts.
The average age of respondents was 31,
though the number in higher age
groups was significant.
Technical specialist, university student
and researcher are the top three
occupations cited by respondents.
GVU's World Wide Web survey relies on an adaptive questioning technique that uses responses to select future questions. For instance, a response to a question about the type of computer owned by respondents determines the following questions about the software used to browse the Web, since some programs run only on certain computers.
The "decision tree" technique allows the researchers to gather more information with fewer questions, since respondents see only the questions that apply to them. Pitkow hopes the questionnaires will serve as prototypes for the surveying techniques, which may be more widely applied as Web use grows and more companies establish a presence there.
Information about the adaptive questioning techniques and results from GVU's 2nd WWW User Survey were presented at the Third International World Wide Web Conference at Darmstadt, Germany April 10 through 13.
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