First and most obviously is price. People want more information about a purchase that will significantly affect them financially. Some product characteristics are easily expressed in a text and picture format. If the appearance and specifications of a product are most important in the purchase decision, it can be represented well online. In contrast, even the most sophisticated multimedia plug-in cannot begin to convey less tangible characteristics like taste or fragrance.
Some companies build websites purely to enhance product image.
In these cases, product characteristics are less relevant. Rapidly changing financial information is ideally suited to Internet distribution, for it is easily represented in a text and graphics format. It also is something that is important enough to people that they want ready access to it. This probably helps to account for the quite high percentage found in Money. Between January 1996 and October 1997, the percentage of URLs in Glamour , Money , Newsweek , and PC Computing increased roughly 2 to 3 times.