A study of the service quality of general portals

An Internet portal provides not only a linkage to Web sites but also an entry point to information services. To be successful, it needs to attract a large volume of visitors and consistently deliver a high level of service quality. However, we believe that the service quality of Internet portals, differentiated into business and general portals, should be measured by different instruments, as they are used for different purposes. We conducted two studies employing exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis to identify an instrument to measure the service quality of general portals. The results indicated that the instrument is a four-factor model that includes adequacy of information, appearance, usability, and privacy and security. However, only the first two factors are significantly associated with customer satisfaction. Also, it was noted that Web page appearance was not significant for business portals but was for general portals.