Service Quality in Online Purchasing in Iran

The daily growth of the Internet and e-commerce is changing the way corporations conduct business with their consumers who are increasingly expecting higher services, becoming time saved, and wanting more convenience. Therefore, today's companies have moved their focuses from products and sales to customer oriented marketing (Lin, 2003) and they more realize that the key determinant of their success or failure is electronic service quality (Yang, 2001) which holds a significant importance to customer satisfaction. The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of the web site quality factors that affect customer satisfaction. For this reason a quantitative research has been done, and data have been collected through an online questionnaire. Our results show that in Iran reliability is the most important quality factor from online book shoppers' perspective. The results presented in this research help online companies to locate their position against competitors, pin point their weak points and determine which web sites characteristics will improve their performance in order to provide an effective and efficient web site to meet the needs of a diverse population of users.

Keywords:

E-commerce , impact of web sites , consumer satisfaction , quality , evaluation