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In the emerging electronic environment, knowing how to create customercentered Web sites is of great importance. This paper reports two studies on user perceptions of Web sites. First, Kano's model of quality was used in an exploratory investigation of customer quality expectations for a specific type of site (CNN.com). The quality model was then extended by treating broader site types/domains. The results showed that (1) customers' quality expectations change over time, and thus no single quality checklist will be good for very long, (2) the Kano model can be used as a framework or method for identifying quality expectations and the time transition of quality factors, (3) customers in a Web domain do not regard all quality factors as equally important, and (4) the rankings of important quality factors differ from one Web domain to another, but certain factors were regarded as highly important across all the domains studied.

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine consumer attitudes toward online shopping in Jordan. The paper introduces an integrated model which includes trust, perceived benefits, perceived web quality, and electronic word of mouth (eWOM) along with their relationships in order to examine their effects on consumer attitudes toward online shopping. Design/methodology/approach - A structured and self-administered online survey was employed targeting online shoppers of a reputable online retailer in Jordan; i.e. MarkaVIP. A sample of 273 online shoppers was involved in the online survey. A series of exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the research constructs, unidimensionality, validity, and composite reliability. Structural path model analysis was also used to test the hypothesized relationships of the research model. Findings - The empirical findings of this study indicate that consumer attitudes toward online shopping is determined by trust and perceived benefits. Trust is a product of perceived web quality and eWOM and that the latter is a function of perceived web quality. Hence, trust and perceived benefits are key predictors of consumer attitudes toward online shopping, according to the results. Further, the authors also found that higher levels of perceived web quality lead to higher levels of trust in an online shopping web site. Perceived web quality was found to be a direct predictor of trust, and the former positively and significantly influences perceived benefits. Also, the authors found that 28 percent of the variation in online shopping attitudes was caused by perceived benefits and trust. Research limitations/implications - The research sample included only early adopters who are usually described as personal innovators and risk takers. Future research is encouraged to focus on other groups such as non-adopters to understand their online shopping attitudes. Another limitation is derived from the geographical context of the current study; that is Jordan. The findings are not necessarily applicable to other Arab countries and the rest of the world. Therefore, replications of the current study in different countries would most likely strengthen and validate its findings. Also, the study is cross-sectional which does not show how attitudes of consumers may change over time. The authors encourage future studies to employ a longitudinal design to understand the changes in consumers' attitudes toward using online shopping over time. Finally, this study examined only one case in point and thus findings cannot be generalized to other online shopping web sites. Future research is highly encouraged to examine consumers' attitudes toward other online shopping web sites inside and outside Jordan. Practical implications - The paper supports the importance of trust and perceived benefits as key drivers of attitudes toward online shopping in emerging markets like Jordan. It further underlines the importance of perceived web quality contribution to perceived benefits and trust as well as the key role of the later in forming online shoppers' attitudes. Online retailers' executives and managers can benefit from such findings for future e-marketing strategies and acquire new customers to achieve long-term performance objectives. Originality/value - This paper is one of the very few attempts that examined attitudes toward online shopping in the Arab world. Importantly, it revealed the drivers of online shoppers' attitudes in Jordan. National and international online retailers planning to expand their operations to Jordan or to the Middle East Region have now valuable empirical evidence concerning the determinants of online shopping attitudes and online shoppers' behavior in Jordan upon which e-marketing strategies can be formulated and implemented.

Assessing quality of a web site is most important especially because people world over are dependent on the content hosted on the WEB site for various purposes. May factors are to be considered for assessing the quality. Quality of every factor must be considered individual and also the total quality of the WEB site must be computed. This paper is primarily focused on the factor called “Completeness” which is one of the factors that can be considered for computing the quality of the WEB sites.  There can be much of the disconnected in the content hosted on the web site such as missing href, columns in the tables and forms. The more of the disconnectedness in the content that is hosted on the WEB site, the less the quality, as the information hosted on the WEB site is incomplete and less readable

Social commerce is emerging as an important platform in e-commerce, primarily due to the increased popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Linkedln, and Twitter. To understand the user's social sharing and social shopping intention in social networking Web sites, we conducted an empirical study on a popular microblog to investigate how social factors such as social support and relationship quality affect the user's intention of future participation in social commerce. The results indicate that both factors play a critical role. Social support and Web site quality positively influence the user's intention to use social commerce and to continue using a social networking site. These effects are found to be mediated by the quality of the relationship between the user and the social networking Web site. Our findings not only help researchers interpret why social commerce has become popular, but also assist practitioners in developing better social commerce strategy.

An unrecognized significance of the web acts as a driving force for the massive and rapid growth of websites in each domain of social life. For making a successful website, it is necessary for developers to embrace appropriate web testing and evaluation methodology. Some valuable works in the past have striven to appraise the web applications quantitatively. Various parameters have been considered which are again sub-parameterized to measurable indicators. But their weighing criterion has not been appropriately taken into account according to the domain of the website. Also, the relative degrees of interactions among parameters have not been taken into consideration. The work presented in this paper aims at describing a framework, Quality Index Evaluation Method to gauge the design quality of a website in the form of index value. An automated tool has been designed and coded to measure the metrics quantitatively. A weighing technique based on Fuzzy-DEMATEL (Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory Method) has been applied on these metrics. Fuzzy trapezoidal numbers have been used for assessment of parameters and the final design quality index value. To verify the use of framework in different website domains, it has been exercised on eight academic (four institutional and four digital libraries), five informative and four commercial websites. The results have been validated through the most widely used method in literature, i.e., user judgment. Opinions of users for each website have been quantified and aggregated with fuzzy aggregation technique. Experimental results show that the proposed framework provides accurate and consistent results in very less time.

This paper aims to investigate the relationship between antecedents of trust in online shopping and purchase intention. Specifically, it examines the relationship between perceived service quality, perceived website quality, and perceived reputation, as well as the mediating role of trust in online shopping and the moderating role of perceived risk between trust and online purchase intention. An online survey was used to collect data (356 valid responses) and SmartPLS structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) was employed to hypothesize a model. Data were collected from September to December 2019. Results suggest the moderating role of perceived risk over trust in online shopping and purchase intention. The slope for the relationship between trust in online shopping and purchase intention is moderated by perceived risk, showing that the relationship becomes stronger when perceived risk is high. Trust significantly mediates the relationship between perceived service quality, website quality reputation, and online purchase intention. This work furthers web-store decision makers' understanding of the significant influence of trust and its mediating impact on online shopping and demonstrates how an increase in trust decreases the intensity of the impact of perceived risk on online purchase intention. To increase the number of sales and decrease the intensity of risk, companies must increase the level of trust, which mitigates risk and increases customer bonding with companies. As there is no consensus on the mediating role of trust in online shopping and the moderating role of perceived risk, this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature.

An electronic commerce marketing channel is fully mediated by information technology, stripping away much of a product's physical informational cues, and creating information asymmetries (i.e., limited information). These asymmetries may impede consumers' ability to effectively assess certain types of products, thus creating challenges for online sellers. Signaling theory provides a framework for understanding how extrinsic cues—signals—can be used by sellers to convey product quality information to consumers, reducing uncertainty and facilitating a purchase or exchange. This research proposes a model to investigate website quality as a potential signal of product quality and consider the moderating effects of product information asymmetries and signal credibility. Three experiments are reported that examine the efficacy of signaling theory as a basis for predicting online consumer behavior with an experience good. The results indicate that website quality influences consumers' perceptions of product quality, which subsequently affects online purchase intentions. Additionally, website quality was found to have a greater influence on perceived product quality when consumers had higher information asymmetries. Likewise, signal credibility was found to strengthen the relationship between website quality and product quality perceptions for a high quality website. Implications for future research and website design are examined.

Trust is a crucial factor in e-commerce. However, consumers are less likely to trust unknown Web sites. This study explores how less-familiar e-commerce Web sites can use branding alliances and Web site quality to increase the likelihood of initial consumer trust. We use the associative network model of memory to explain brand knowledge and to show how the mere exposure effect can be leveraged to improve a Web site's brand image. We also extend information integration theory to explain how branding alliances are able to increase initial trust and transfer positive effects to Web sites. Testing of our model shows that the most important constructs for increasing initial trust in our experimental context are branding and Web site quality. Finally, we discuss future research ideas, limitations, implications, and ideas for practitioners.

The main channel for disseminating information is now the Internet. Users have different expectations for the calibre of websites regarding the posted and presented content. The website’s quality is influenced by up to 120 factors, each represented by two to fifteen attributes. A major challenge is quantifying the features and evaluating the quality of a website based on the feature counts. One of the aspects that determines a website’s quality is its completeness, which focuses on the existence of all the objects and their connections with one another. It is not easy to build an expert model based on feature counts to evaluate website quality, so this paper has focused on that challenge. Both a methodology for calculating a website’s quality and a parser-based approach for measuring feature counts are offered. We provide a multi-layer perceptron model that is an expert model for forecasting website quality from the “completeness” perspective. The accuracy of the predictions is 98%, whilst the accuracy of the nearest model is 87%.

Purpose - This research extends Mehrabian and Russell's Stimulus-Organism-Response model to include both external (i.e. reputation) and internal source of information (i.e. website quality) as stimuli which affect consumers' response systems. The purpose of this paper is to test a more comprehensive model consisting of reputation and website quality (stimuli), cognition and emotion (organism) and purchase intention (response). Design/methodology/approach - In total, 219 usable questionnaires were obtained at a large Midwestern university through online survey. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was employed for data analyses. Findings - Reputation had a significant positive effect on consumers' emotion and significant negative effect on perceived risk. All four website quality dimensions had significant negative effects on perceived risk and significant positive effects on emotion, except for customer service. Perceived risk had a significant negative effect on consumers' emotion, and both perceived risk and emotion had a significant impact on purchase intention. Research limitations/implications - This research employed convenience sampling, which resulted in a majority of female respondents. The results may be generalized to a limited extent. Originality/value - This study allows for empirical examination of the different effects of various components of retail websites on emotion, perceived risk and behavioral intentions. This research will add value to the related literature by filling the void of previous research and also will provide practical implications for online retailers on designing and maintaining positive consumer response. Strength of the research lies in its ecological validity, since respondents were not simply all reacting to the same single stimulus.