Despite the importance of online product recommendations (OPRs) in e-commerce transactions, there is still little understanding about how different recommendation sources affect consumers' beliefs and behavior, and whether these effects are additive, complementary, or rivals for different types of products. This study investigates the differential effects of provider recommendations (PRs) and consumer reviews (CRs) on the instrumental, affective, and trusting dimensions of consumer beliefs and shows how these beliefs ultimately influence continued OPR usage and product purchase intentions. This study tests a conceptual model linking PRs and CRs to four consumer beliefs (perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived affective quality, and trust) in two different product settings (search products versus experience products). Results of an experimental study show that users of PRs express significantly higher perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use than users of CRs, while users of CRs express higher trusting beliefs and perceived affective quality than users of PRs, resulting in different effect mechanisms toward OPR reuse and purchase intentions in e-commerce transactions. Further, CRs were found to elicit higher perceived usefulness, trusting beliefs, and perceived affective quality for experience goods, while PRs were found to unfold higher effects on all of these variables for search goods.
Despite the need to better understand how customers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions perceive the quality of these software services and how these perceptions influence SaaS adoption and use, there is no extant measure that comprehensively captures service quality evaluations in SaaS. Based on previous SERVQUAL and SaaS literature, field interviews and focus groups, a card-sorting exercise, and two surveys of SaaS using companies, we develop, refine, and test SaaS-Qual, a zones-of-tolerance (ZOT)-based service quality measurement instrument specifically for SaaS solutions. Besides validating already established service quality dimensions (i.e., rapport, responsiveness, reliability, and features), we identify two new factors (i.e., security and flexibility) that are essential for the evaluation of service quality of SaaS solutions. SaaS-Qual demonstrates strong psychometric properties and shows high nomological validity within a framework that predicts the continued use of SaaS solutions by existing customers. In addition to developing a validated instrument that provides a fine-grained measurement of SaaS service quality, we also enrich existing research models on information systems continuance. Moreover, the SaaS-Qual instrument can be used as a diagnostic tool by SaaS providers and users alike to spot strengths and weaknesses in the service delivery of SaaS solutions.