The Impact of Website Quality on Purchase Intention in the Sri Lankan E-Commerce Context: The Moderating Effect of Perceived Risk and Perceived Value

Abstract

Driven by supportive technologies and global circumstances, the e-commerce market is uninterruptedly growing and revolutionizing the way modern consumers shop. Website Quality stands out as a crucial subject in e-commerce since the website is the place from which the customers get their first impression. This impression about the Website Quality is said to eventually influence customers’ Purchase Intention. Especially in today’s hyper-competitive e-commerce environment, the performance of e-commerce businesses deteriorates when they fail to provide adequate importance to Website Quality as a means of determining the Purchase Intention of customers. Hence, understanding the impact of Website Quality on Purchase Intention becomes critical. Although Website Quality in different contexts was examined, the impact of Website Quality on Purchase Intention was not studied with Perceived Risk and Perceived Values as moderators. Hence, the purpose of this study was to develop a conceptual model to examine the impact of Website Quality on Purchase Intention and to investigate the moderating effect of Perceived Risk and Perceived Value on this relationship, in the Sri Lankan e-commerce context. A deductive quantitative approach was used in this study. The conceptual model was tested using partial least squares-structural equation modeling with data collected through an online questionnaire from 198 ‘Daraz’ website users, employing the convenience sampling method. According to the findings, Information Quality, System Quality and Service Quality had a significant positive effect on Purchase Intention. Notably, Service Quality had the highest effect on Purchase Intention. However, the moderating effect of Perceived Risk and Perceived Value were not supported. This study contributed to strengthening the existing knowledge on the impact of Website Quality on Purchase Intention in the Sri Lankan e-commerce context, and the findings could be more important to developing countries. Further, the findings suggested online retailing managers to provide excellent customer service and to pay greater attention to the technical aspects of the website.