Defining the customer’s expectations in e‐business

E‐commerce has recently generated, at a very fast rate, a lot of new techniques trying to win customers and make money. The success of these techniques can only be real if the customer recognizes them and, most important of all, starts buying from you. This paper deals with discovering an e‐commerce user’s expectations that make them qualify and choose an e‐business supplier. To accomplish this, we use the “critical incident technique”. This method results in a hierarchical relationship between critical incidents, satisfaction items and customer’s needs, that are related to quality dimensions. The quality dimensions obtained changed in relation to the traditional service quality dimensions, showing that after a period of experience, the customer starts to establish his/her quality standards and take decisions based on these standards. Both the surviving and the successful companies are those which will learn to identify, understand and satisfy these needs.