The influence of quality on the success of e-commerce systems

Abstract

Appraising the success of information systems has long been a difficulty for management. Indeed, the definition of 'success' is controversial as the term itself is multi-dimensional and can be assessed at various levels of the organisation using many differing criteria. However, the development of validated evaluation metrics is critical to future decision making for e-commerce success. This research addresses difficulties in measuring e-commerce success by implementing the DeLone and McLean (D&M) model of IS success (1992, 2003) in an e-commerce environment. This research considers the influence of quality on e-commerce success by measuring the information quality and system quality attributes of an e-commerce system and the intention to use, user satisfaction and intention to transact from a sample of respondents. This research provides one of the first empirical e-commerce applications of the updated IS success model proposed by DeLone and McLean (2003). This paper found significant relationships between Information Quality and System Quality and three success dimensions: intention to use, user satisfaction intention to transact. This study found the following information and system quality constructs to be most important in predicting e-commerce success: ease of understanding, personalisation and reliability. In particular, this research found that reliability is more important than usability where transactions are concerned and security is important to transactional zones of e-commerce systems, but is not the most important factor.