Information Assurance in B2C Websites for Information Goods/Services

Consumer fraud on the Internet is slowly mounting, resulting in appreciable monetary losses, and growing distrust of e-commerce websites. Information assurance has been proposed to be one solution to counter this, to which consumers have also been favorably receptive. We explore here the extent of adoption of such assurance among Business-to-Consumer (B2C) information goods/services websites. The main objective of the paper is to carry out exploratory/descriptive research to study the extent of assurance services in websites that provided information/digital goods or services to the consumer directly through their online presence. The paper investigates the connections between company characteristics (company type, size and reputation) and assurance service dimensions (security, privacy and business integrity) using a novel measure, the emphasis density index (EDI) of information assurance and presence of assurance service seals. This study provides some practical insights from the findings of