IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ecl/stabus/1666.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Does the Quality of Online Customer Experience Create a Sustainable Competitive Advantage for E-Commerce Firms?

Author

Listed:
  • Venkatachalam, 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 shareholder value. We measure shareholder value as the price-to-sales ratio, a measure commonly used for e-commerce firms. On average, we find that the association between online customer experience scores and the price-to-sales ratio is positive. In addition, the magnitude of the positive association is decreasing in the extent of competition (especially from brick-and-mortar firms) and the probability of failure, as measured by the amount of cash left to fund operations. The stock market appears to view differences in the quality of online customer experience as a viable competitive advantage even after the April 2000 stock market crash.

Suggested Citation

  • Venkatachalam, Mohan & Rajgopal, Shivaram & Kotha, Suresh, 2000. "Does the Quality of Online Customer Experience Create a Sustainable Competitive Advantage for E-Commerce Firms?," Research Papers 1666, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    • Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1666
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/RP1666.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean Tirole, 1988. "The Theory of Industrial Organization," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262200716, April.
    2. Ittner, CD & Larcker, DF, 1998. "Are nonfinancial measures leading indicators of financial performance? An analysis of customer satisfaction," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36, pages 1-35.
    3. S.A. Lippman & R.P. Rumelt, 1982. "Uncertain Imitability: An Analysis of Interfirm Differences in Efficiency under Competition," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 13(2), pages 418-438, Autumn.
    4. Venkatachalam, Mohan & Rajgopal, Shivarum & Kotha, Suresh, 2000. "The Relevance of Traffic for Internet Stock Prices," Research Papers 1616, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    5. Carl Shapiro, 1983. "Premiums for High Quality Products as Returns to Reputations," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 98(4), pages 659-679.
    6. Keith Weigelt & Colin Camerer, 1988. "Reputation and corporate strategy: A review of recent theory and applications," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 9(5), pages 443-454, September.
    7. Trueman, B & Wong, MHF & Zhang, XJ, 2000. "The eyeballs have it: Searching for the value in internet stocks," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 38, pages 137-162.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Ciccotello, Conrad S. & Wood, Russell E., 2001. "An investigation of the consistency of financial advice offered by web-based sources," Financial Services Review, Elsevier, vol. 10(1-4), pages 5-18.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Venkatachalam, Mohan & Davila, Antonio, 2001. "Non-financial Performance Measures and CEO Compensation: An Analysis of Web Traffic," Research Papers 1675, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business.
    2. Anna Nagurney & Dong Li, 2014. "Equilibria and dynamics of supply chain network competition with information asymmetry in quality and minimum quality standards," Computational Management Science, Springer, vol. 11(3), pages 285-315, July.
    3. Villalonga, Belen, 2004. "Intangible resources, Tobin's q, and sustainability of performance differences," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 54(2), pages 205-230, June.
    4. Mahenc, Philippe & Meunier, Valérie, 2006. "Early Sales of Bordeaux grands crus," Journal of Wine Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(1), pages 57-74, April.
    5. Martin Gaynor, "undated". "What Do We Know About Competition and Quality in Health Care Markets?," GSIA Working Papers 2006-E62, Carnegie Mellon University, Tepper School of Business.
    6. Sascha Raithel & Manfred Schwaiger, 2015. "The effects of corporate reputation perceptions of the general public on shareholder value," Strategic Management Journal, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 36(6), pages 945-956, June.
    7. Delgado García, Juan Bautista & De Quevedo Puente, Esther, 2016. "The complex link of city reputation and city performance. Results for fsQCA analysis," Journal of Business Research, Elsevier, vol. 69(8), pages 2830-2839.
    8. Cuffaro, Nadia & Di Giacinto, Marina, 2015. "Credence goods, consumers’ trust in regulation and high quality exports," Bio-based and Applied Economics Journal, Italian Association of Agricultural and Applied Economics (AIEAA), vol. 4(2), pages 1-19, August.
    9. Durand, Robert B. & Koh, Shern-Wei & Ng, Hock Guan, 2003. "From gold to silicon," Journal of Multinational Financial Management, Elsevier, vol. 13(3), pages 273-286, July.
    10. Kroszner, Randall S. & Stratmann, Thomas, 1999. "Does Political Ambiguity Pay? Corporate Campaign contributions and the Rewards to Legislator Reputation," Working Papers 155, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business, George J. Stigler Center for the Study of the Economy and the State.
    11. Cameron Truong & Thu Ha Nguyen & Thanh Huynh, 2021. "Customer satisfaction and the cost of capital," Review of Accounting Studies, Springer, vol. 26(1), pages 293-342, March.
    12. Sepideh Parsa & Reza Kouhy, 2008. "Social Reporting by Companies Listed on the Alternative Investment Market," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 79(3), pages 345-360, May.
    13. Juan Prieto-Rodriguez & Manuel Gonzalez-Díaz, 2008. "Is There an Economic Rent for Island Hotels?," Tourism Economics, , vol. 14(1), pages 131-154, March.
    14. Roller, Lars-Hendrik & Sinclair-Desgagne, Bernard, 1996. "On the heterogeneity of firms," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 40(3-5), pages 531-539, April.
    15. Zhixi Wan & Brian Wu, 2017. "When Suppliers Climb the Value Chain: A Theory of Value Distribution in Vertical Relationships," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(2), pages 477-496, February.
    16. Livingston, Miles & Williams, Glenn, 2007. "Drexel Burnham Lambert's bankruptcy and the subsequent decline in underwriter fees," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 84(2), pages 472-501, May.
    17. Mooweon Rhee & Pamela R. Haunschild, 2006. "The Liability of Good Reputation: A Study of Product Recalls in the U.S. Automobile Industry," Organization Science, INFORMS, vol. 17(1), pages 101-117, February.
    18. Schaberl, Philipp D., 2016. "Beyond accounting and back: An empirical examination of the relative relevance of earnings and “other” information," Advances in accounting, Elsevier, vol. 35(C), pages 98-113.
    19. Thorsten Posselt, 1998. "Motive für Selektiwertrieb — Eine institutionenökonomische Untersuchung," Schmalenbach Journal of Business Research, Springer, vol. 50(12), pages 1098-1119, December.
    20. Lutz, Stefan, 2003. "International Coordination of Quality Standards and Vertical Product Differentiation," ZEW Discussion Papers 03-41, ZEW - Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1666. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/gsstaus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.