The Electronic Shopping or ES Test

The ES Test was developed by de Kare-Silver (2000) to assess the extent to which consumers are likely to purchase a retail product using the Internet. De Kare-Silver suggests factors that should be considered in the ES Test:

1 Product characteristics. Does the product need to be physically tried, or touched, before it is bought?

2 Familiarity and confidence. Considers the degree to which the consumer recognises and trusts the product and brand.

3 Consumer attributes. These shape the buyer's behaviour - is he or she amenable to online purchases (i.e. in terms of access to the technology and skills available) and does he or she no longer wish to shop for a product in a traditional retail environment? For example, a student familiar with technology may buy a CD online because they are comfortable with the technology. An elderly person looking for a classical CD would probably not have access to the technology and might prefer to purchase the item in person.

In his book, de Kare-Silver describes a method for ranking products. Product characteristics and familiarity and confidence are marked out of 10, and consumer attributes are marked out of 30. Using this method, he scores products as shown in Table 2.4.

De Kare-Silver states that any product scoring over 20 has good potential, since the score for consumer attributes is likely to increase through time. Given this, he suggests companies will regularly need to review the score for their products.

Table 2.4 Product scores in de Kare-Silver's (2000) Electronic Shopping (ES) potential test

Table 2.4 Product scores in de Kare-Silver's (2000) Electronic Shopping (ES) potential test