Towards an understanding of the behavioural intention to use a web site

The growing popularity of the Internet has resulted in exciting opportunities for companies to reach out for customers with very little additional costs. In order to communicate with the potential customers through WWW effectively, a well-designed Web page is needed. Yet, the factors that affect customer's perception about the acceptance of a Web site are unclear. This paper addresses why users accept or reject a Web site and how user's acceptance is affected by the features (i.e. information quality of a Web site, response time and system accessibility) provided by a Web site. A study with 139 users of a Web site was conducted to test the hypothesised model. The results showed that the technology acceptance model (TAM) fully mediated the usage behaviour even in the Internet environment, accounting for 64% of the variance in usage. Furthermore, response time of a Web site is an important factor in affecting the user's beliefs of such a Web site. This showed that Web page providers not only have to make the content informative and timely, but they also need to design a speedy Web page by not putting in unnecessary pictorial data as it might jeopardise the display time. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.