A User-Centric Approach to Develop Indicators for Assessing Information Quality on E-Commerce Websites

Abstract

Abstract

The objective of this research was to find the indicators for assessing the information quality (IQ) on e-Commerce (EC) website. The approach of this research focused on the opinions and requirements of the users in Thailand from retail and accommodation services businesses. The researchers adopted mixed methods research, namely (1) qualitative research to analyze the structure and contents of the websites and analyzethe information usage behaviors of 30 experienced consumers and 5 experts and (2) quantitative research by bringing the attributes found from the qualitative research to develop an online questionnaire. There were 595 experienced consumersanswered the online questionnaire. Then the data collected from the online questionnaire was analyzed to find confirmatory factorsby using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA).

The results from the qualitative research show that majority of the experienced consumers selected to use the e-Marketplace websites.The key findings from analyzing these websites arethey haveboth the commercial and non-commercial informationand also the information for transaction processing, the design of information structure and navigation system of these websites help the consumers to access the data easily, conveniently, and quickly by concerning of data security, and there are 68 attributes of information quality which will be used to develop an online survey for quantitative research. The collected data from the online questionnaire were analyzed CFA. The results show that the consumers of both retail and accommodation services businesses seeked the website from friends or using Google to search and select the top-ranked URLs. Then they first considered the credibility of the website, such as reputation, business experience, trusted agency certification, policy, and satisfaction and reviews from consumers who had purchased or used the service. After that they would pay most attention on ordering process and payment processwhich consists of 5 quality indicators, namely accuracy, completeness, accessibility, information security and consistency.The attribute of retail businessthat has the highest average isthe correctness of total amount calculated whereas for the accommodation services business is the accommodation classification accuracy.