EBQUAL: A Success Model of E-Business

Abstract

E-business is a new type of promising business model in the Internet era. However, there have been not many researches on what are the success factors of e-business. In this paper, it is assumed that building trust is one of the most important success factors. Based on the assumption, among others, the quality of e-business is proposed to be the source of trust in business-to-customer e-markets. In other words, it is assumed that increasing the quality of ebusiness is one of the most important critical success factors in the competitive business-to-customer e-markets. Based on the assumption, the quality of e-business is analyzed, including the relationships with other factors such as trust and discontinuity. A conceptual framework is introduced to propose that the quality of e-business is a source of trust in e-markets. In addition, discontinuity is proposed to negatively affect the quality of e-business and trust. Recovery is proposed to moderate the impact of discontinuity on quality and trust.