| Presentation flaws are abundant in web sites, but there has been no study to determine how presentation flaws affect consumers' attitudes and perception of quality of an on-line store. Also of interest is how these attitudes and perception of site quality influence consumers' trust in the on-line store, which in turn affects their intention to purchase. The factors under investigation in this experimental study were incompleteness (missing pictures, missing information, ‘under construction’ pages), errors (typographical mistakes), poor style (e.g., badly formatted tables), and delay (8 second page loading time).; The theoretical foundation of this research is multi-disciplinary. It stems from various streams of literature that are relevant to the study of the effect of presentation flaws: trust and credibility, impression formation, impression management, social influence and persuasion, attribution theory, and screening from the economics literature.; The study was conducted as three laboratory experiments. The first looked at three main factors, incompleteness, error, and poor style, and used 160 student subjects in a completely balanced, full factorial design (2 x 2 x 2). In the second experiment, delay was added, and used 224 student subjects in another completely balanced, full factorial design (2 x 2 x 2 x 2). It was found that error, incompleteness, and poor style affected consumers' perceived quality of the web site and their attitude toward the site. No effects of delay were detected. Furthermore, it was found that trust was affected by attitudes and perceived quality, which ultimately influenced consumers' intention to purchase. In the third experiment, the effect or priming by the Minnesota Clerical Test was examined. No priming effect was found with respect to users' perceptions of the flaws.; In addition, post hoc analysis supported that the relationship between the factors and attitudes and perceived quality was mediated by the perception of the flaws. Supplemental analysis also supported that the relationship between attitude and perceived quality and intention to purchase was mediated by trust. |
