Does the Quality of Online Customer Experience Create a Sustainable Competitive Advantage for E-Commerce Firms?
Author InfoVenkatachalam, Mohan (Stanford U) Rajgopal, Shivaram (U of Washington) Kotha, Suresh Abstract Claims have often been made that the quality of the online customer experience in terms of web site ease of use, selection of goods offered, quality of customer service, the effectiveness of virtual community building, and site personalization are crucial to the success of e-commerce firms. If differences in the quality of online customer experiences provide a long-term competitive advantage, we would expect a positive relation between quality of online customer experience and shareholder value. Skeptics, however, argue that any advantage arising from the quality of online customer experiences would simply be competed away through imitation and innovation. To test these opposing views, we use scorecards of online customer experience provided by Gomez Advisors for a sample of 48 e-commerce firms during the period 4Q:1999 to 3Q:2000 and examine the relation between the scores and shar
