Developing and Validating a Quality Assessment Scale for Web Portals

The web portals business model has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly findings about which services and characteristics make a website a portal and which dimensions determine the customers’ evaluation of the portal’s quality. Taking the example of financial portals, the authors develop a theoretical framework of the web portal quality construct by determining the number and nature of corresponding dimensions, which are: security and trust, basic services, cross-buying services, added values, transaction support and relationship building. To measure the six portal quality dimensions, a hierarchically built measurement scale is developed and validated. 1. THE PORTAL BOOM’S DRIVERS Considering the fact that banks invest billions of Euros in the internet infrastructure (the Deutsche Bank invests approximately half a billion Euros per year), customer satisfaction and customer retention become key success factors in e-banking as well. E-banking, in particular, will only function profitably if there is not a race on the acquisition of new customers but rather on the retention of existing customers (Reibstein, 2002). This is required by the high acquisition costs in online banking that lie 20–40 % above those of traditional offline business (Reichheld & Schefter, 2000; Reibstein, 2002). A positive customer value in the internet can only be achieved by establishing long-term customer relationships. Only during later transactions costs of serving customers fall, word-of-mouth referrals spread and the willingness to pay rises (Reichheld & Sasser, 1990). During the last few years these findings have led to developing simple web sites into comprehensive financial portals on which traditional bank products are no longer the only services offered. Now, all financial problems customers face can be solved at this one source. If all financial transactions can be settled on the portal site, then the user will no longer need to use other web sites. The multitude of available portal resources should also create incentives for a longer site visit (stickiness) during each use.