Perceptual antecedents of user attitude in electronic commerce

Abstract

This paper examines three cognitive antecedents of Web user attitude toward a commercial website -- perceived informativeness, perceived entertainment, and perceived irritation. We tested the theoretical relationships between the three cognitive antecedents, attitude toward the site, and intention to return to the site using Partial Least Squares (PLS) with data collected in a field study of three e-commerce websites. The model explains a high percentage of the variance in attitude toward the site and intention to return and all the coefficients in the model are significant. We conclude that both perceived informativeness and perceived entertain-ment are significantly and positively related to attitude toward the site, while perceived irritation is significantly and negatively related to attitude toward the site. We also conclude that attitude toward the site is significantly and positively related to a user's intention to return to the site.