Antecedents of B2C electronic commerce and service success

Abstract

Given the rapid growth of, and increasing investments in, B2C electronic commerce and service (hereafter, e-commerce and e-service), it has become important to investigate how this web-based presence will increase service quality, customer satisfaction, or customer retention. Therefore, more attention is being given to exploring the effects of the IT artifact (i.e., website) on these success measures in IS and marketing. These two perspectives offer valuable contributions to our understanding of the role of the IT artifact in e-commerce and e-service success, although each only tells the story incompletely. While the IS perspective does not provide a convincing clue to the causal link between website dimensions and customer satisfaction or continuance intention, the marketing perspective is clumsy at exploring the role of the IT artifact. Furthermore, in order to understand continued e-commerce and e-service use, the expectation-confirmation model (ECM) was proposed. Past studies based on ECM focused on a referent that is centered on the target IT artifact. The effect of this referent, captured through confirmation, has been strongly demonstrated. However, the saliency of two additional reference effects, captured through self-image congruity and regret, has not been explored. In order to buttress these two theoretical caveats, this dissertation focuses on two research objectives; (i) to explore the effects of IT artifacts on success measures such as customer satisfaction and continuance intention from the customer perspective in the contexts of e-commerce and e-service, and (ii) to investigate the effects of the two additional referents in e- service post-adoption phenomena. For the first objective, this dissertation proposes two research models; one explores how website information and system dimensions may affect the service quality delivered by a website, customer satisfaction, and ultimately, customer loyalty behavior in the context of e-commerc...