Measuring Success Factors of E-Commerce Infomediary

Infomediaries are intermediaries that aggregate information from multiple electronic commerce retailers and provide services of searching and comparison for Internet customers. It provides added values to the traditional one-to-one business-to-customer electronic commerce. Measures that influence the success of Internet commerce has been studied by Torkzadeh and Dhillon (2002) based on the means objectives and fundamental objectives that were identified by Keeney (1999). However, those measures are developed for general oneto-one business-to-customer electronic commerce and do not include specific characteristics of infomediaries. This paper describes the development of instruments to measure the factors that influence infomediary success. We generated 136 items for means and fundamental objectives of infomediaries. These constructs were examined for reliability and validity. The results suggested a 4-factor, 21-item instrument to measure mean objectives in terms of online payment, navigation design, information relevance and product choice, and a 6-factor, 14-item instrument to measure fundamental objectives in terms of shopping enjoyment, transaction time, shopping convenience, product value, cost and searching time.