The impact of relative information quality of e-commerce assurance seals on Internet purchasing behavior

WebTrust assurance was introduced jointly by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants (CICA) with much fanfare in the late 1990s. Since then, the WebTrust product has not experienced significant market penetration despite providing the highest level of information quality among seals available in the Internet seal market. One reason often given for its poor market penetration is that consumers are unable to differentiate between the information quality of different Internet seals. The purpose of this study is to examine the validity of this explanation. Marketing theory related to consumer risk is used to provide a conceptual foundation for hypotheses related to consumer preferences for Internet seals in general and high information quality seals in particular. The results of the study fail to find consumer interest in a low information quality seal, but did show a strong effect related to preference for a high information quality seal. Unexpectedly, however, these results were not related to buyers' risk propensities.