Dealing with the Transition from Web to Mobile Services: The Role of Consistency and Trust

With the advancement of mobile technologies, numerous web service providers begin to extend their web services to the mobile context. Thus, the mechanism about users’ mobile service adoption behavior under the context of web – mobile service transition attracts both practitioners and researchers’ attention. In this study, regarding the consistency between the web services and its corresponding mobile services as a critical factor to capture the service transition, we propose a typology of consistency and examine the extent to which and when consistency contributes to users’ mobile service adoption intention. Specifically, consistency is classified into the behavioral consistency (e.g., operational consistency) and the object-based consistency which includes the consistency in information, system and service in terms of the information systems success model. We also contend the mediating effect of behavioral consistency between object-based consistency and adoption intention, and the moderating effect of users’ initial trust in web services. A field survey with 235 mobile service users is conducted in a mobile word-of-mouth platform to test the research model. The results confirm our mediating and moderating hypotheses. The implications for theory and practice are also discussed.