E-commerce service failures have been the bane of e-commerce, compelling customers to either abandon transactions entirely or switch to traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. Yet, there is a paucity of studies that investigates how such failures manifest on e-commerce websites and their impact on consumers. This paper, therefore, synthesizes extant literature on e-service and system success to arrive at a novel classification system that delineates e-commerce service failures into information, functional, and system categories, each with its own set of constituent dimensions. Extending expectation disconfirmation theory (EDT), we further distinguish among disconfirmed outcome, process, and cost expectancies as major consequences of e-commerce service failures. A theoretical model of e-commerce service failure classifications and their consequences was constructed together with testable propositions that relate the three failure categories to consumers' disconfirmed expectancies. Finally, we explore the validity of our theoretical model based on descriptive accounts of actual occurrences of e-commerce service failures and their corresponding consequences. Consistent with our theoretical model, information and functional failures were found to be associated with disconfirmed outcome and process expectancies respectively. System failures, on the other hand, do not affect consumers' disconfirmed expectancies, thereby contradicting our predictions. Post hoc analysis on constituent dimensions of information, functional, and system failures yielded additional insights on the preceding observations.
Despite extensive deliberations in contemporary literature, the design of citizen-centric e-government websites remains an unresolved theoretical and pragmatic conundrum. Operationalizing e-government service quality to investigate and improve the design of e-government websites has been a much sought-after objective. Yet, there is a lack of actionable guidance on how to develop e-government websites that exhibit high levels of service quality. Drawing from marketing literature, we undertake a goal approach to this problem by delineating e-government service quality into aspects of IT-mediated service content and service delivery. Whereas service content describes the functions available on an e-government website that assist citizens in completing their transactional goals, service delivery defines the manner by which these functions are made accessible via the web interface as a delivery channel. We construct and empirically test a research model that depicts a comprehensive collection of web-enabled service content functions and delivery dimensions desirable by citizens. Empirical findings from an online survey of 647 respondents attest to the value of distinguishing between service content functions and delivery dimensions in designing e-government websites. Both service content and delivery are found to be significant contributors to achieving e-government service quality. These IT-mediated service content functions and delivery dimensions represent core areas of e-government website design where the application of technology makes a difference, especially when considered in tandem with the type of transactional activity. A split sample analysis of the data further demonstrates our model's robustness when applied to e-government transactions of varying frequency.
E-governments have become an increasingly integral part of the virtual economic landscape. However, e-government systems have been plagued by an unsatisfactory, or even a decreasing, level of trust among citizen users. The political exclusivity and longstanding bureaucracy of governmental institutions have amplified the level of difficulty in gaining citizens' acceptance of e-government systems. Through the synthesis of trust-building processes with trust relational forms, we construct a multidimensional, integrated analytical framework to guide our investigation of how e-government systems can be structured to restore trust in citizen-government relationships. Specifically, the analytical framework identifies trust-building strategies (calculative-based, prediction-based, intentionality-based, capability-based, and transference-based trust) to be enacted for restoring public trust via e-government systems. Applying the analytical framework to the case of Singapore's Electronic Tax-Filing (E-Filing) system, we advance an e-government developmental model that yields both developmental prescriptions and technological specifications for the realization of these trust-building strategies. Further, we highlight the impact of sociopolitical climates on the speed of e-government maturity.