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

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 ecommerce systems, but is not the most important factor.