Trusting Relationships between Consumers and Business

This section addresses trust in the B2C business model, which is a specialization of O2I in the DEI matrix, i.e., the business is a service provider and the consumer is the recipient. Although the concern here is the trust of the online consumer for the business, it should be noted that trust is always a two-way street, i.e., the business will also need to trust the consumer (e.g., is the consumer using a stolen credit card?). According to Hoffman, Novak, and Peralta (1999):

"The reason more people have yet to shop online, or even provide information to Web providers in exchange for access to information, is the fundamental lack of faith between most businesses and consumers on the Web today."

As Friedman, Kahn, and Howe (2000) point out, "In online commercial transactions, we are vulnerable to trust violations in two ways: loss of money and loss of privacy." Without trust it is not possible to conduct e-commerce with any degree of success. McKnight, Choudhury, and Kacmar (2002) note that willingness to depend on a vendor to deliver is not the same as believing that a vendor will use consumer data ethically or that the Internet is secure.

This section uses the example of e-commerce system quality as a means of highlighting the role of trust in consumer interactions. A broad framework for assessing customer perceptions of e-commerce quality is the E-Qual (previously WebQual) instrument (Barnes & Vidgen, 2002). E-Qual is founded in quality management (King, 1989) and builds on three dimensions—website usability, information quality, and service interaction quality—to create a rounded view of e-commerce quality.

• Usability: Usability draws on the field of human computer interaction (Davis 1989, 1993; Nielsen, 1993; and more latterly for Web usability, Nielsen 1999, 2000; Spool, Scanlon, Schroeder, Snyder, & DeAngelo, 1999) and is concerned with the pragmatics of how a user perceives and interacts with a website. It is not, in the first instance, concerned with design principles such as the use of frames or the percentage of white space, although these are concerns for the website designer who is charged with improving usability.

• Information quality: Assuming that a website is usable, then the user's attention can turn to the content of the website. Most of the IS literature examining aspects of information and information quality (Bailey & Pearson, 1983; DeLone & McLean, 1992) predates the explosion in Web commerce and builds on the seminal work of Shannon and Weaver. They propose 'information' as the message in a communication system, from sender, via a communication channel, to receiver. This can be measured at a number of levels: technical, referring to the accuracy and efficiency of the system producing information; semantic, referring to the success of the system in conveying intended meaning; and effectiveness, referring to the effect or influence of the information on the receiver. Such a conception is most poignant, particularly to Web commerce, where organizations aim to transmit data efficiently and accurately over the Internet, such as product offerings, which convey a desired meaning and achieve a desired effect, such as a financial transaction.

• Service interaction quality: Information quality is clearly important in conducting e-commerce, but it does not capture interaction aspects. A service encounter may or may not involve a human interaction element, and in the case of Internet transactions will probably not. There is a service element involved in the delivery of any product, whether it is intangible or tangible. Although important, in many industries cost is not the sole determinant of competitiveness; the customer experience is recognized as a significant basis for differentiating suppliers. The E-Qual instrument draws on SERVQUAL (Zeithaml, Parasuraman, & Berry, 1990) in constructing questions related to service interaction.

Buying books over the Internet is one of the early applications of B2C e-commerce and has matured to become relatively stable, at least in Internet terms, with 5.4% of total global book sales in 1999. E-Qual was implemented using an online questionnaire targeted at users of the three largest UK online bookshops—Amazon, Bertelsmann Online (BOL), and the Internet Bookshop (IBS)—and resulted in 280 usable responses (Barnes & Vidgen, 2002). As well as rating a site for each of the qualities in the instrument, respondents are asked to rate the importance of the quality to them in this context using a one to seven scale.

Table 1 shows the top six and bottom six questions in terms of importance to respondents. Those considered most important are heavily tied to information accuracy, usability, and issues of trust. Such questions concern security and reliability regarding completion of transactions, receipt of goods and personal information, accuracy of content, as well as ease of site use and navigation. Conversely, those items considered least important are different, revolving around empathy with the user (communication, community, and personalization), and site design (site experience, appropriateness of design, and aesthetics). Given the high profile accorded to Amazon.com's reader reviews of books, it is interesting to note that respondents rate the community aspects as low in importance. Perhaps the basic building blocks of e-commerce—accurate information and safe-to-complete transactions—are still uppermost in users' minds.

Table 1: Importance Ranking of the Questions

Most important (Top six qualities)
9	Provides accurate information
17	It feels safe to complete transactions
22	I feel confident that goods/services will be delivered as promised
18	My personal information feels secure
3	I find the site easy to navigate
4	I find the site easy to use
21	Makes it easy to communicate with the organisation
6	The design is appropriate to the type of site
8	The site creates a positive experience for me
5	The site has an attractive appearance
19	Creates a sense of personalization
20	Conveys a sense of community
Least important (Bottom six qualities)

To provide an overall benchmark for the three e-commerce operations, the total weighted score is indexed against the total possible score, thus allowing an E-Qual Index (EQI) to be calculated. Amazon achieved the highest EQI at 72%, followed by BOL (70%), and IBS (67%). Factor analysis showed the presence of five constructs. The usability questions contained two constructs—usability and design. Service interaction subdivided into trust and empathy, while information questions group together in a single construct. These dimensions indicate how site users perceive e-commerce quality in the online bookshop domain.

Figure 2 demonstrates clearly that the Amazon UK site stands 'head and shoulders' above the two rivals. The indices for the Amazon subcategories make a clear circle around the other two sites, with trust rating particularly well. Other areas are less strong, in relative terms. Empathy has the lowest WQI for Amazon. The scores of the two other bookshops are close. Information quality presents the largest discrepancy with IBS leading BOL. IBS also scored marginally higher for empathy and usability.

Figure 2: Radar Chart of E-Commerce Quality

The survey indicates that the differences in usability between the sites are small, suggesting that once a basic level of usability is achieved, then site design is unlikely to be a differentiating competitive factor. With regard to design, the difference is more marked, indicating that the Amazon site is preferred, although this may be due in part to respondents being more familiar with the Amazon site.

In the bookshop survey respondents rated 'accurate information' as the most important item, indicating that e-commerce businesses need to pay particular attention to the content of their websites. Managing information quality is likely to be rather more difficult than improving Web usability since the content management cycle needs to manage Web documents from creation through publishing to archival and, eventually, destruction. Whereas usability can be evaluated quickly, information quality is likely to require an enterprise-wide approach.

While usability and information quality might be addressed largely through internal changes, interaction quality requires a stronger external perspective. The greatest differentiator of the e-commerce operations is 'trust', where Amazon is a long way ahead of its competitors. Of the four questions that comprise 'trust', three are rated as second, third, and fourth most important by respondents—only 'accurate information' is rated more highly. Trust is an essential part of e-commerce strategy (Clarke, 1999; Gefen, 2000; Jarvenpaa, Tractinsky, & Vitale, 2000), and Urban, Sultan, and Qualls (2000) argue that to be successful in e-commerce, the organization needs to place trust at the center of its Internet strategy. Urban and colleagues conclude that firms must provide trusted information, advice, and service to their customers and meet customer expectations. In return, firms will get customer loyalty and customers willing to pay a premium price.