An Approach to Create Persuasive Web Sites

Persuasion is an act to change people's attitudes or behaviors and it will be an important element for the next-generation e-commerce or e-shopping sites. This paper discusses an approach to develop a persuasive Web site with a persuasion function to persuade the customers to buy a specific item. Persuasion process consists of three steps; acquiring the initial preference of the customer, analyzing the preference and creating a plan to persuade him/her, and asking again his/her final choice. We developed a Web site as a prototype that incorporates the above persuasion steps and evaluated it through an experiment. In the evaluation, 12 out of 20 participants could notice the persuasion function but only 2 out of 20 subjects were persuaded by the Web site. We still need to work on making the site more persuasive by utilizing a virtual agent or character.