هنر درخواست در تجارت الکترونیکی: درک تاثیر محصول و کیفیت وب سایت در خرید های آنلاین The Art of Appeal in Electronic Commerce: Understanding the Impact of Product and Website Quality on Online Purchases

1. INTRODUCTION Contemporary business to consumer (B2C) e-commerce sites strive to match their brick-and-mortar counterparts in terms of conversion rates (Becerra and Korgaonkar, 2011). Due the anonymity of online transactions coupled with the spatial and temporal displacement intrinsic to e-commerce sites (Xiao and Benbasat, 2011), it is not uncommon for consumers to be concerned about the risks involved in transacting with unknown e-retailers (Gefen, 2002a; Gefen et al., 2003a; Kim et al., 2008) and the uncertainty associated with product quality (Jiang and Benbasat 2004). Consequently, e-commerce sites must not only replicate the shopping experience of brick-and-mortar stores (e.g., Wells et al., 2011), they must also present their product offerings in an appealing fashion (e.g., Jiang and Benbasat, 2007a). These efforts have culminated in the rapid growth in e-commerce sales, which more than doubled the rate of growth of their brick-and-mortar counterparts (Tamimi and Sebastianelli, 2015). However, the continued growth of e-commerce is impeded by the information asymmetry inherent in the transactional relationship between consumers and e-retailers. Consumers generally do not possess perfect information prior to purchase (Biswas and Biswas, 2004) and thus can only indirectly assess the quality of products offered on ecommerce sites via the latter’s web interface (Jiang and Benbasat, 2004). Even for experienced consumers, uncertainty regarding product quality remains a valid concern (Williams, 2013). Information asymmetry hence deters consumers from committing to online purchase, which in turn limits e-commerce’s market penetration. In the fourth quarter of 2016, e-commerce retail sales only accounted for 8.3% of total sales1 . In this study, we seek to unleash the potential of e-commerce by confronting the problem of information asymmetry in online transactions. Signaling theory has been espoused by researchers as a fitting theoretical lens for comprehending how information asymmetry can be alleviated (Connelly et al., 2010; Spence, 2014). Signaling theory holds that insiders (signalers) can deliberately communicate to outsiders (receivers) unobservable attributes of an artifact, a process termed as signaling (Connelly et al., 2010; Spence, 2014). Guided by signaling theory, scholars have investigated how information cues (i.e., signals related to the true quality of product offerings) conveyed by an e-commerce site alleviate information asymmetry between consumers and e-retailers by facilitating the former’s evaluation of unobservable product attributes (Spence, 2014). Prior research has identified several aspects of e-commerce sites (e.g., reliable payment and user-friendly interface) that can be signaled to induce consumers’ purchase behavior (Van Der Heijden et al., 2003). Likewise, past studies have uncovered product-related properties, such as diagnosticity, that can be signaled by e-commerce sites to promote sales (Jiang and Benbasat, 2004). Yet, research to-date does not distinguish between product and service related qualities that can be conveyed to consumers in e-commerce context. Insomuch as the quality of e-commerce sites consists of product quality (Wells et al., 2011) and website (service) quality (Al-Debei et al., 2015), we extend prior research by postulating the existence of distinct signaling processes for product and website (service) qualities.