Antecedents of Online Shopping Success: A Reexamination and Extension

The qualities of the technological artifact of online shopping websites and the overall support delivered by the service provider through the website are generally agreed to be crucial elements in creating customer satisfaction and loyalty. However, a lack of consensus exists on how those qualities are related to each other, what they consist of, and how they can be conceptualized. Based on relevant literature and using a servicescape framework as a theoretical lens, we divide online shopping website qualities into information and system qualities and argue that both factors affect service quality. We conceptualize each of the three types of quality as a second-order formative construct comprising its most salient quality dimensions: information quality consisting of reliability, understandability, currency, and relevance; system quality consisting of usability, availability, and responsiveness; and service quality consisting of efficiency and fulfillment. Our model of how information, system, and service qualities are related to one another and to customer satisfaction and loyalty is then tested empirically with a data set of 570 online shopping customers. Our integrated model reconciles the seemingly contradictory conceptualizations of previous researchers and provides an effective way to create customer satisfaction and loyalty.