As the pertinence of online consumer shopping continues to grow, more and more e-retailers are erecting websites. In this increasingly competitive environment, building customer loyalty and retaining customers is integral to achieving sustained profitability. While one stream of literature has suggested that e-retailers should concentrate on improving quality, another stream has recommended that the focus should be on building trust with customers. This paper represents an early, working attempt to synthesize these parallel streams, investigating how the interplay between three forms of quality (information, system, and service) and trust help to retain customers. Integrating information systems and marketing research, the results of this paper suggest that trust mediates the relationship between each type of quality and both satisfaction and repurchase intentions. Furthermore, of the three types of quality that are examined, service quality engenders the greatest impact on trust, followed by information quality then system quality. The paper concludes with a discussion of this preliminary model as well as directions for the future development of this project
