Introduction

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Digital marketing ^[1] is one of the most significant phenomena having taken place in the e-commerce environment in the last five years. Because most firms have only begun to position themselves to exploit the business opportunities presented by e-commerce, it is difficult to know how best to measure the success and effectiveness of an e-business's efforts. To provide better management of e-business, more empirical research and theoretical development are required with respect to the effectiveness measure of web sites.

As Kettinger & Lee (1994) noted, developing measures of effectiveness has long been a focus of MIS field (Delone & McLean, 1992; Zmud, 1979). Such techniques as system usage (Ein-Dor & Segev, 1982; Lucas, 1974), cost/benefit analysis (King & Schrems, 1978), information economics (Maish, 1979), and critical success factors (Zahedi, 1987) have all been used with mixed results to gauge the contribution that information systems and the information services function make to firms and individuals. While acknowledging the contribution of these approaches, the most commonly used measures of effectiveness within the MIS field are users' perceptions of satisfaction (Delone & McLean, 1992; Melone, 1990). Traditionally, both the User Information Satisfaction (UIS) and End-User Computing Satisfaction (EUCS) instruments have been used as surrogate measures of system effectiveness to evaluate user satisfaction toward information systems (e.g., Bailey & Pearson 1983; Ives et al. 1983; Doll & Torkzadeh 1988). To more comprehensively measure IS service quality, Kettinger & Lee (1994) validated and refined the IS-SERVQUAL and used it to enhance the effectiveness measure of information services function. Accordingly, the effectiveness of web sites can be measured by different techniques, such as system usage, cost/benefit, and customer perceptions of web site service quality. In our study, customer perceptions of web site service quality was also used as a surrogate measure of e-commerce system effectiveness. The effectiveness measure of web sites must incorporate different aspects of service quality to become a diagnostic instrument for practical and theoretical use. Such purposes cannot be achieved when effectiveness is captured using only a single aggregated scale.

To assess the extent and specific nature of customer perceptions of service quality rendered by web sites, different dimensions of service quality must be theoretically and operationally defined. The development of such multidimensional instrument can (1) capture multiple aspects of web site service quality that may be subsumed within general (single scale) measures, (2) provide insight into the nature of interrelationships among web site service quality dimensions, and (3) provide a more accurate diagnostic tool to assess digital marketing activities within organizations. Until such instrument is developed, the varying criteria of web site service quality among studies will inhibit the generalization and accumulation of research findings. In addition, using a well-validated instrument, e-commerce managers can better justify their Internet marketing activities when they devote a significant portion of their organizational resources to such activities.

Traditionally, the SERVQUAL scale (c.f., Parasuraman et al., 1988, 1991; Babakus & Boller, 1992; Carman, 1990; Cronin & Taylor, 1992; Zeithaml, 1988; Zeithaml et al., 1990) has been used as a generic instrument for measuring customer perceived service quality of traditional retail and service businesses. And, the IS-SERVQUAL scale (c.f., Kettinger & Lee, 1994; Kettinger et al., 1995; Van Dyke et al., 1997, 1999) has been used to evaluate user perceived service quality of information systems. However, both the SERVQUAL and IS-SERVQUAL scales, developed for the conventional retailing or information systems environments, may no longer be appropriate for the digital marketing context, where the roles of a web customer are in some ways different to those of a traditional consumer or an IS end user (see Table 1). The SERVQUAL and IS-SERVQUAL instruments focus primarily on general or specific perceived service quality in physical environments rather than on perceived web site service quality in digital marketing environments. Regardless of how an instrument may have been carefully validated in its original form, excising selected items does not result in a valid derivative instrument (Straub, 1989). Therefore, there is a need to develop a standardized instrument for measuring customer perceptions of web site service quality, which will be essential to the development of e-business theories, and provide researchers with a basis for explaining, justifying, and comparing difference across results.

Table 1: Role Differences Between Traditional Customers, IS End Users, and Web Customers

Aspects	Traditional Customers	IS End Users	Web Customers
Participation in System Development	-	+	-
Physical Interaction	+	+	-
Need for EDP Staff and Service	-	+	-
Need for Customer Support	+	+	+
Purchase Behaviors	+	-	+
+ Usually or Always
- Rarely or Never

The primary purpose of this research is to validate a generic instrument for measuring customer perceptions of service quality of web sites that market digital products and/or digital services. ^[2] This chapter is divided into four sections, which provide an overview of the steps followed herein. The first section reviews the development of the SERVQUAL and IS-SERVQUAL scales, while the second section describes the research methodology. The third section then validates the reliability and validity of the proposed EC-SERVQUAL measures using confirmatory factor analysis. Finally, the fourth section discusses implications and limitations of the present work and explores some directions for future investigation.

^[1]Digital marketing refers herein to Internet marketing for digital products and services, such as paper-based information products, product information, graphics, audio, video, tickets and reservations, financial instruments, government services, electronic messaging, business value creation processes, auctions and electronic mark, remote education, and interactive entertainment (Choi et al., 1997).

^[2]Since there seems to be some overlap between digital products and services, the researchers usually use the term, digital products, to represent both in the later sections.

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