Critical Success Factors for Online C2C Auction Websites – A Consumer’s Perspective

Due to the rapid growth in broadband Internet usage, online auction becoming a popular e-business model along market changes from the rigid traditional business transaction environment. In order to identify critical factors for succeeding in the future competitive market for the auction intermediary, this study adopted the Information, Communication, Distribution and Transaction (ICDT) model as a framework to collect important variables of Taiwan’s online auction Websites via the method of content analysis. Then, a questionnaire survey was conducted to customer-to-customer online auction consumers for identifying critical success factors and gauging their perception differences with the auction Websites. The results indicate that consumers cared the most on “trade safety”, “governance and order”, “reputation and scale”, “communication channel”, “information search”, “transaction process” and “copious information”. The impacts of consumer profile, Web behavior and shopping experiences and categories of auction items on these factors are also discussed with the implications.