While e-tailing shares much common ground with traditional retailing, some unique natures of the Internet such as means of impersonal communication and the Web site as an information system make it necessary to reexamine whether traditional service quality dimensions and their contents are still applicable to Internet-based services (Cox and Dale, 2001). Some conceptual and empirical studies have attempted to address key attributes of service quality specially related to Internet commerce. Hoffman and Novak (1997) have pointed out that personalization is required for Internet firms to conceptualize the Internet as a unique consumer marketplace. In the process of investigating the Web sites of the top 100 US retailers, Griffith and Krampf (1998) have discovered that the lack of prompt responsiveness, especially to e-mail inquires, was the most common negatively perceived phenomenon in cyberspace. In their conceptual examination of service quality in e-commerce, Cox and Dale (2001) proposed that certain traditional dimensions such as competence, courtesy, cleanliness, comfort and friendliness, helpfulness, care, commitment and flexibility might not be applicable to the Internet commerce setting. However, service quality attributes such as accessibility, communication, credibility, understanding, appearance and availability should still be relevant to e-commerce. Based upon six focus group interviews, Zeithaml et al. (2001) have identified 13 e-service quality dimensions. These are reliability, responsibility, access, flexibility, access, flexibility, ease of navigation, efficiency, assurance/trust, security, price knowledge, site aesthetics and customization/personalization. A content analysis of customer evaluations of Internet pharmacy services conducted by Yang et al. (2001) have revealed 19 quality dimensions which were sorted into three categories: product cost and availability; customer service; and online information systems.
