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Online shopping is now a popular form of consumer buying behavior across a broad range of product categories (Rose & Samouel, 2009). The Internet gave birth to online retailing, and electronic business has become a common way of doing business (Alba et al., 1997; Cai & Xu, 2011; Gao et al., 2012; Wolfinbarger & Gilly, 2003). However, an electronic hypermedia environment often faces challenges in anticipating and satisfying customers because of the physical separation between buyers and sellers (Pavlou & Gefen, 2004; Phang et al., 2010; Qureshi et al., 2009; Trocchia & Janda, 2003). In an online shopping context, consumers do not have complete information about the products and services that are offered by e-tailer on a website. Therefore, they seek information that allows them to discriminate between a seller of high-quality goods and a seller of low-quality goods (Kuan et al., 2008; Ranganathan & Ganapathy, 2002). Therefore, taking full advantage of the Internet’s capability to deliver complete information to consumers well is critical for successful e-commerce (Gao et al., 2012).
The extant research has recognized that the information quality of websites is a significant predictor of the satisfaction and trust, revisit intention, and most importantly, purchase intention of online consumers (Bock et al., 2012; Chen et al., 2009; Evanschitzky et al., 2004; Kuruzovich et al., 2008; McKinney, 2004; Mukherjee & Nath, 2007). Information quality has been verified to be strongly related to system’s perceived usefulness and net benefits, especially in the context of e-commerce systems (Delone & McLean, 2003). However, several studies argued that the effect of information quality on purchasing intention is relatively weak or varies in different circumstances (e.g. Jang et al., 2008; Kuan et al., 2008; Ranganathan & Ganapathy, 2002; Zo & Ramamurthy, 2009). Thus, the potential contingency of its importance can be highlighted, such that information displayed on an e-tailer website provides different values to consumers depending on the e-tailer’s characteristics and the consumer’s characteristics.
Since electronic commerce has become the common way of doing business, market-orientation strategy play a crucial role in gaining competitive advantage in on-line and off-line worlds (Luo & Seyedian 2003). To this end, we include market orientation in the proposed research model. From the signaling perspective, the provision of comprehensive information on the website signals an e-tailer’s commitment to cater to and care about consumers’ information needs, and the market orientation of the e-tailer could strengthen such signals, for example, a customer-oriented strategy might be more in line with this signal. However, a competitor-oriented strategy that mainly focuses on price and promotion but not complete information provision.