Abstract
Information quality (IQ) plays a critical role in ecommerce consumers’ purchase decisions, and prod-uct-related user-generated content (PUGC) is an increasingly important source of information. Never-theless, vendors currently do not take full advantage of PUGC since it is mainly used in later phases of the purchase process to evaluate single products. Integrating PUGC into earlier phases of the purchase process might be promising. However, little is known about which dimensions of IQ consumers evaluate as being most important in different phases of the purchase process. To close this gap, this study com-prises an exploratory survey to investigate the perceived importance of various IQ dimensions in each of the three phases of an idealized purchase process (i.e., screening, filtering, and evaluation). Concep-tually, this study thus extends the concept of IQ to a dynamic perspective. The results indicated that IQ needs are stable throughout the process and that users strongly favor accuracy and believability when using aggregated PUGC extracted from reviews in contrast to timeliness, completeness, and amount of data, which were assessed as the least important IQ dimensions. Practically, the findings can inform the design of ecommerce websites, specifically how to optimize the presentation and integration of PUGC.
Recommended Citation
Hirschmeier, Stefan; Tilly, Roman; and Schoder, Detlef, "INFORMATION QUALITY NEEDS THROUGHOUT THE PURCHASE PROCESS" (2016). Research Papers. 13.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2016_rp/13