Experiment on Multi-attribute Sorting Panel in E-commerce

Grounded in users´ online purchasing behaviors, we developed a multi-attribute sorting panel for online shopping and incorporated opinion attributes in it. Furthermore, the multi-attribute sorting panel was expanded to three alternative designs that mainly differ in the way of eliciting relative importance for attributes, called direct assessment, indifference method, and indirect measurement. Then, we used online hotel booking as the test domain to compare the three alternative designs. Through analysis of objective and subjective measures, the multi-attribute sorting function embedded with opinion attributes has been verified to be effective. Moreover, the direct way outperforms the indifference and indirect ways regarding perceived decision accuracy, cognitive effort, satisfaction and intention to use in an online environment.