ISSUES AND ADVANCES IN B2C RESEARCH

Since the major dot com decline in 2001, there has been a quiet revolution in business to consumer (B2C) commerce that has online spending growing at record levels. According to a comScore report in January 2005, online spending in 2004 grew by 26 percent to a record level of more than $117 billion (see Table 1). With a surge in the increase of number of individuals with access to the Internet1, the opportunity for B2C commerce is expected to continue to steadily grow. Recognizing this opportunity, not only are the etailers interested in attracting potential customers to their websites, but the traditional brick and mortar stores are also setting up virtual store fronts and competing in this space. For example, Wal-Mart has aggressively pursued a strategy to encourage online buying and now appears in a recent report as being in the top 50 Internet properties based on unique visitors released by comScore (see Table 2). This extraordinary growth in electronic commerce has also raised a myriad of questions of interest to both academic researchers and practitioners alike. In this issue of JECR, five papers [Apigian, Ragu- Nathan, Ragu-Nathan, & Kunnathur (ARRK), Shergill & Chen, Schaupp & Belanger, Yang & Padmanabhan, (YP) and Zhuang (ZH)] address three important questions: * What characteristics of virtual store fronts influence consumer shopping experience? * How do we evaluate the impact of techniques designed to induce consumer interest and increase satisfaction? * What is the business value of Internet technologies for organizations? Shergill and Chen (SC) and Schaupp and Belanger (SB) address the first question by studying factors that influence consumer satisfaction and consumer attitude toward online shopping. The SB study was conducted in the US while SC conducted their study using New Zealand (NZ) customers. Issues associated with online shopping have been explored by other researchers. For example, Koufaris [2002] used the technology acceptance model (TAM) to explain online consumer behavior. Torkzadeh and Dhillon [2002] developed and validated measures that influence success of electronic commerce. Agarwal and Venkatesh [2002] tested a heuristic evaluation procedure to assess web site usability. More recently, Chang et al. [2004] (CCL) and Monsuwe et al. [2004] surveyed the research advances in online shopping. The CCL study is especially pertinent to research appearing in this issue of JECR. Their study investigated antecedents to online shopping adoption. The first reference model, posited that intention or usage of online shopping is affected by three major factors: perceived characteristics of the web as a sale channel (the sub-factors are perceived risk, relative advantage, online shopping experience, service quality, and trust), website and product characteristics (the sub-factors are risk reduction measures, website features, and product characteristics), and consumer characteristics (the sub-factors are consumer shopping orientations, demographic variables, computer/Internet knowledge and usage, consumer innovation, and psychological variables). It is useful to frame the SC and SB studies based on the model by CCL. SC found that website design, website reliability/fulfillment, website customer service, and website security/privacy are the dominant factors that influence customer perception of online purchasing. All the four factors were a part of the CCL model. Website design (variable under Website Features sub-factor) is found to have positive relationship with Intention/Usage of Online Shopping. In contrast to prior studies that reported no relationship between website reliability (variable under Service Quality sub-factor) and attitude toward online shopping (e. g., Vijayasarathy & Jones [2000]), SC report a positive relationship between them. In fact, the New Zealand buyers gave highest ratings for website reliability/fulfillment factor. Research on the influence of customer service on perceptions of online shopping has also yielded mixed results in prior studies [Burroughs & Sabherwal, 2001; Jarvenpaa & Todd, 1997; Mathwick et al. …