The Effects of Quality Signals Through Website Context Based on Trust in the Internet Service

Buyers and sellers involved in a transaction have access to different amounts of information related to the quality of a product or service (Spence 1973). This phenomenon is recognized as “asymmetric information”. The uncertainties arising from asymmetric information about a product potentialize the problem recognized as “adverse selection”. To avoid adverse selection organizations must invest in quality signals. Wells, Valacich and Hess (2011) suggest that quality signals to the buyer in internet could be presented through the site conditions on the organization’s website. This research follows a descriptive and causal approach, to establish through an experiment the cause–effect relations between investment in organization’s website and confidence about the service on the internet. Wells, Valacich and Hess (2011) suggest that a potentially credible signal of quality to the buyer on the Internet could provide a very good condition to the consumer believe in the organization’s website content. Schlosser, White and Lloyd (2006) argue that investment in the website of an organization could influence the perceptions of online buyers.

Trust is a multidimensional construct. Cummings and Bromiley (1996) define trust in three dimensions: (1) cognitive; (2) affective; and (3) connotative. Gronroos (2000) introduced the idea of trust as an expectation of one party (buyer) to another (seller), to behave in a predictable way. Online business trust becomes even more important.

This study adopted an experimental design 1 × 3: (1) offering a service on the internet and (2) referring to three levels of perceived investment in a website (high, medium and low). Three distinct websites were created for a fictitious company and service provider. The websites were differentiated by their characteristics and volume of investment that was employed in its development. Characterization of service and brand were created by the authors of this study with the aim of achieving greater control of effects on the prior knowledge by the consumer. We adopted metrics of multi-item scales of semantic differential type of nine points. We include confidence about the service based on Harris and Goode (2004, 2010) and investment signal by Wells, Valacich and Hess (2011). The sample of this study is composed of 56 (43.70 %) males and 79 (56.30 %) females. All the participants are young: 122 individuals (90.37 %) 18–25 years, and the others (9.63 %) between 26 and 30. Considering Hair et al. (2005), the number of 30 observations is enough. We have had 45 records in each treatment. That is, 45 individuals (33.3 %) exposed to high, medium and low investment websites. We perform descriptive statistics and ANOVA. To test hypotheses, we accepted a significance level (p < .05), as considered acceptable for applied social sciences (Hair et al. 2005). The result shows significant differences between the three types of websites regarding the consumer’s perception of the service organization’s investment in the website. Perception of investment on the website F (219,117; p <.0010. The results confirm the findings from Wells, Valacich and Hess (2011) and the propositions by Schlosser, White and Lloyd (2006), Mavlanova and Koufaris Benbunan-Fich (2012). The investment in the website can be perceived by consumers on the internet. We found significant differences between the three types of websites, concerning the confidence of the consumer about service. Trust in service F (203,119; p <.0010. So, we confirm also the hypothesis H2. This study represents a first step to better understand the relationship between investment in quality signals and trust in websites.References available upon request.