ENGINEERING THE QUALITY IN INTERNET APPLICATION FOR COMMERCE Rosmiza Wahida Abdullah1, Azlianor Abdul Aziz2, Muhammad Suhaizan

Sulong3 Department of Software Engineering Faculty of Information and Communication Technology Universiti Teknikal Malaysia Melaka (UTeM) 76109 Durian Tunggal Melaka, Malaysia {1rosmiza, 2azlianor, 3suhaizan}@utem.edu.my Abstract With the proliferation of the Internet, Internet applications are being widely deployed commercially and users are increasingly interacting with them especially for buying and selling activities. For many years, these Internet commerce applications have been successfully adopted in businesses to better serve their online customers. It is therefore very important to identify quality factors that are critical to the success of Internet commerce applications for satisfying customers and businesses. This research aims to contribute to the understanding of quality involved in deploying Internet commerce application. The findings of this study would be useful to business users and web developers as it provides guidance to improve the quality of their Internet commerce. The importance of quality in the Internet applications for commerce needs to be accepted in order to increase business performance. Keywords: Quality, e-Commerce, Web application 1. Introduction The Internet has become the most powerful technology for everyone to benefit. It allows people to use this technology as a medium for communication throughout the world with no boundaries. Consequently, it gives possibilities and opportunities to change the way people do business with their customers and social network among them (Dedhia, 2001). As many people depend and rely on the Internet and the Web, the technology is changed and evolved to suit their daily activities including online shopping (Cheung & Lee, 2005). The rapid growth of the Internet and the Web with the excessively increase of Internet users has forced businesses to invest huge in establishing Internet commerce (Xu & Koronios, 2004). Internet commerce is here to stay and its happening now to benefit consumers and businesses (Dedhia, 2001). Internet commerce has been practised worldwide with the use of the Internet for conducting businesses online. It aims to aid customers and businesses in the new changing style of doing activities online, in particular, buying and selling. The popular categories of Internet commerce are Business-to-Consumer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) which can be considered to create new business environment via Internet (Hasan & Abuelrub, 2008). Existing research in Internet commerce quality is motivated by the awareness of its application to design better system for improving business performance. Numerous researchers have concerned about the quality in Internet commerce towards customer and business satisfaction (Zhu & Kraemer, 2002; DeLone & McLean, 2003). Thus, organisations are looking forward to realising the benefits of these investments by measuring and analysing their Internet commerce in the aspect of quality.

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Quality is important. It has become more acceptable for the management of quality in information system development especially in Internet application. It has been a significant success to some international businesses today such as e-Bay, Amazon and Dell. The key quality elements in developing and managing Internet commerce application are reviewed in this article. The article is organised as follows: the next section provides the related work where relevant literature is composed and reviewed. The core section is discussing the quality of Internet applications for commerce. The final section draws a conclusion of our work which proposes an extension to quality initiatives in deploying Internet commerce. 2. Quality Aspects A successful business not only depends on customers shopping experience but also deals together with business partners (Stefani & Xenos, 2008). Thus, there is a need of quality in Internet commerce application for this to happen. In the literature, most of the quality research in Internet commerce falls into satisfying customers and only few found for business satisfaction. Accordingly, this review focuses on two major aspects of quality in Internet commerce: system quality and service quality. System quality contains two key components: process quality and data quality; which employs a set of quality data which are associated to different process quality. Service quality concerns about the interactivity with customers and businesses where it involves information quality and design quality. We illustrate the model of the review in Figure 1.

Figure 1 : Quality Aspects in Internet Commerce Application Referring to the above model, we specify the scope of the research that is emphasised on the Internet application where it acts as an interface for web interactivity with customers and businesses. 3. System Quality The quality of system for Internet commerce can follow the same standard as software engineering - product quality that is ISO 9126 standard (ISO/IEC 9126-1, 2001). One of the characteristics of ISO standard is functionality which can adopt for the development and implementation of Internet commerce application (Stefani & Xenos, 2001). This basic characteristic refers to the whole process workflow of the business process including procedure of payment and especially security for safety. That is why the key to the success of Internet commerce is quality. Some of the most important quality concern in the system for
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Internet commerce is the process quality (Sarkis & Sundarraj, 2000; Stefani & Xenos, 2008) and data quality (Gertz, Ozsu, Saake & Sattler, 2003). 3.1. Process Quality Recent research shows that there is a need of quality in the Internet commerce process including information searching, online ordering, delivery and payment, and after-sales service (Su, Li, Song & Chen, 2008; Vaidyanathana & Devaraj, 2008). Involving both customers and businesses at almost every phase of the process will greatly improve the quality of processes (Cua, McKone & Schroeder, 2001). Consequently, having quality data in the process will significantly improve the overall system quality (Baiman & Rajan, 2002). Thus, the key to reduced cost and improve efficiency of Internet commerce application is to design and produce it with high-quality processes. 3.2. Data Quality A number of literatures have analysed data quality similar to information quality but some researchers considered them distinguished. The distinction between both qualities is a fundamental that leads to application in the Internet commerce system. Data quality here is referring to technical issues such as data integration from different sources (Hu & Feng, 2005; Madnick, Wang, Lee & Zhu, 2009). In particular, data extracted can be from databases, perhaps heterogeneous web data sources and data warehouses, using SQL formulation (Naumann, 2002; Gertz et al., 2003) for example. As far as the Internet commerce is concerned, data quality is important and should incorporate into each business process workflow especially during transactions for delivering accurate, complete and consistent data (Xu & Koronios, 2004). Thus, data quality needs to be standardised in a manner that makes Internet commerce application a success. 4. Service Quality With high quality service that emerged into the Internet commerce application, it is said to have continuous interactivity to which is essential for business success and survival (Loiacono, Watson & Goodhue, 2007; Hasan & Abuelrub, 2008). Various studies have adopted SERVQUAL model (Oliver, 1980) to measure service quality in different contexts including Internet commerce (Gefen, 2002). The way that the website is designed and the information is displayed on the web is very important to consider for service quality (Kim, Kishore & Sanders, 2005). Hence, it has been proposed that the information quality and design quality are correlated to overall service quality (Hasan & Abuelrub, 2008; Swaid & Wigand, 2009). This will serve better with high quality level to customers and businesses in order to gain their satisfaction and trust (Cheung & Lee, 2005; Swaid & Wigand, 2007; Hsu & Wang, 2008). 4.1. Information Quality The term information here is refer to the content of Internet application that is displayed for the users i.e. customers and businesses. The web content needs quality of information in order to maintain the interactivity to which extend the intentions to use (Jeong & Lambert, 2001). This is agreed in the literature by most researchers where content quality and information quality are formed as a one (Molla & Licker, 2001; DeLone & McLean, 2003; Mich, Franch & Gaio, 2003; Signore, 2005). This quality of information on the web content is where people consider believing and trusting.

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4.2. Design Quality Web design is the visual characteristics of Internet commerce to users where they can interact and communicate. Some researchers consider this quality is conjunction with the information quality or content quality. They described it as information that is well presented and structured for quick understanding (Tan & Tung, 2003; Lin & Joyce, 2004; Behkamal, Kazem Akbari & Kahani, 2006). It allows the users aware of the overall information structure in the Internet application and for easily navigation (Nielsen, 2000; Nah & Davis, 2002; Kim et al., 2005). 5. Conclusion The review of quality in Internet application for commerce uncovers the potential key to design and build high-quality Internet commerce application. It is likely that for Internet commerce to be success is to understand the importance of quality aspects in Internet application. The article proposes a model that comprises two major qualities: system quality and service quality where each of them has 2 sub-qualities: process quality and data quality; design quality and information quality respectively; for businesses evaluating the success of their Internet commerce. As the quality research area is becoming popular and more users are online to seek trustworthy, dependable and reliable site; this research will hopefully contribute to the necessity of quality in developing Internet application. References Baiman, S., & Rajan, M.V. (2002). The Role of Information and Opportunism in the Choice of BuyerSupplier Relationships. Journal of Accounting Research, 40, 247-276. Behkamal, B., Kazem Akbari, M., & Kahani, M. (2006). Critical Success Factors for Success of B2B Electronic Commerce in SMEs. Proceedings of the IADIS International Conference e-Commerce, 9-11. Cheung, C. M. K., & Lee, M. K. O. (2005). Research Framework for Consumer Satisfaction with Internet Shopping. Working Papers on Information Systems, 5, 1-17. Cua, K. O., McKone, K. E., & Schroeder, R. G. (2001). Relationships between Implementation of TQM, JIT, and TPM and Manufacturing Performance. Journal of Operations Management, 19, 675-694. Dedhia, N. S. (2001). E-commerce Quality. Total Quality Management, 12, 397-402. DeLone, W.H., & McLean, E.R. (2003). The Delone and Mclean Model of Information Systems Success: A Ten-Year Update. Journal of Management Information System, 19, 9-30. Gefen, D. (2002). Customer Loyalty in e-Commerce. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 3, 27-51. Gertz, M., Ozsu, T., Saake, G., & Sattler, K. U. (2003). Data Quality on the Web. Dagstuhl Seminar. Hasan, L., & Abuelrub, E. (2008). Assessing the Quality of Web Sites. Journal of Computer Science, 7, 11-20. Hsu, L. C., & Wang, C. H. (2008). A Study of e-Trust in Online Auctions. Journal of Electronic Commerce Research, 9, 310-321. Hu, W., & Feng, J. (2005). Data and Information Quality: An Information-Theoretic Perspective. Computing and Information Systems Journal, 9, 32-47. ISO/IEC 9126-1. (2001). Software Engineering - Product Quality - Part 1: Quality Model. International Organization for Standardization (ISO).
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