Acceptance of Internet-based services: A comparison of three models

Abstract

While more and more products and services are delivered on the Internet, why customers accept these online products and services has drawn considerable interests from the business practice and the research community. Previous research has approached this question from three different perspectives, i.e., transactional, relational and a mixed of the two. However, the relative explanatory power of these three different views in explaining online service acceptance is unknown. This study compares IS Continuance Model (ISCM), the Commitment Trust Theory (CTT), and an integrated model developed from ISCM and CTT. The integrated model, ISCM and CTT were compared using data collected from 185 customers of web hosting services. Results showed that CTT and the integrated model had similar explanatory power and that both the integrated model and CTT explained higher variances in acceptance of online services than ISCM did. The findings suggest that the relational view outweighs the transactional view in terms of explaining acceptance of online services and that relational factors have the ability to explain some variances not explained by transactional factors, but not vice versa. Implications for research and practices are discussed.