ABSTRACT
As consumers increasingly use the Internet to shop or search for product-related information, website effectiveness has become critical for companies offering online transactions or information that could lead to a purchase. The HeI literature on usability has mainly focused on either the intrinsic qualities of a website interface or the level of task performance it enables. More recently, several studies have used a combination of both approaches, and some have incorporated the marketing-specific notion of usability as part of service quality, This study extends this research, examining various other aspects of website quality in addition to usability (quality and quantity of information, visual design, information security and personalization of interactive features). This study confirms the validity of the Netqu@l scale for evaluation of online service quality by a factorial analysis conducted on a sample of over 4,000 subjects evaluating 21 websites in four industry sectors. In addition, this study examines the relative contributions of five components of service quality to website effectiveness (task completion) and user satisfaction. Discriminant and regression analyses were used to rank the factors promoting online service quality, clearly establishing the key importance of
The media never cease to remind us that e-commerce has become indispensable. According to eMarketer projections for 2008, 63% of Canadian Intemet users seek information online before buying a product (eMarketer, 2009) and 51 % complete the purchase online in the US (eMarketer, 2010). But although this new medium is more essential every day, the quality of the services it provides remains highly variable. As pointed out by Agarwal and Venkatesh (2002), companies need to "understand the barriers and facilitators of online purchasing and to construct web sites that can tum visitors into paying customers." This is especially true as consumers increasingly search for product information online, even if the final purchase is not completed by Intemet.
