Abstract

Though there is an astounding increase in the amount of business being conducted online, online merchants face a number of problems in improving online sales. There is little understanding of the factors affecting online sales. Addressing this gap, our study examines the impact of web-site related factors on online sales. Based on literature review, we identified eleven variables representing the content, design, security and privacy dimensions of a web site. We examined the impact of these variables representing the content, design, security and privacy dimensions of a web site. We examined the impact of these variables on online sales through a sample of 487 web sites. Based on this analysis, we identified the following factors to be significantly impacting online sales: frequent update of web content, presence of decision aids, provision of information on the firm, presence of FAQ section, use of multimedia, provision of individual user accounts, secure modes of data transmission, provision to conduct offline and online fmancial transactions and privacy statement. The implications of the results and scope for future research work are presented.