Title: Website quality: imperatives for effective industrial marketing through websites' usage intensity augmentation

Authors: D. Jayaprakash Kanagaraj; J. Clement Sudhahar

Addresses: Research Scholar, Karunya University Business School, Karunya University, Coimbatore 641 114, India ' Professor, Karunya University Business School Karunya University, Coimbatore 641 114, India

Abstract: This paper identifies the relative influence of website qualities on micro and small scale industrial website usage intensity. In this paper, authors have developed an instrument which captures the expected attributes of website quality from the medium and large scale industries perspective. The 23-item instrument measures four qualities of website named (SITEQUAL): system quality (SYQ), information quality (IQ), e-service quality (ESQ) and attractiveness (AT). Data collected from 378 medium and large industries are used to test the research model. Using SPSS, a factor analysis is performed for reduction of data and AMOS is used to test the proposed model. This paper identifies the impact of the factors like system quality, information quality, e-service quality and attractiveness on the industrial website usage intensity. E-service quality has been founded as the dominant attribute among these industrial website qualities. Guidelines for marketing managers and web designers in respect to industrial website designing are proposed.

Keywords: B2B; business to business; industrial marketing; interactive websites; MSME business development; web marketing; website usage augmentation; website quality; micro enterprises; small and medium-sized enterprises; SMEs; web design; system quality; information quality; e-service quality; e-services; electronic services; online services; attractiveness; usage intensity; service quality.

DOI: 10.1504/IJECRM.2015.074190

International Journal of Electronic Customer Relationship Management, 2015 Vol.9 No.4, pp.203 - 219

Accepted: 22 Sep 2015
Published online: 14 Jan 2016 *

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