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Reply to discussion of web assurance seals: how and why they influence consumers'' decisions.

Article Excerpt
I. INTRODUCTION

The plausibility of an expectation gap in assurance services has received considerable attention and is the focus of the discussion of our paper. However, we developed the studies presented in the paper to address the use of web assurance seals as a means to ease fears and concerns of online purchasers rather than to explore the expectation gap issue. As noted by Maudlin (2002), "web assurance is new and still developing," and as such, consumer expectations of different brands of web seals are in their formative stages. While consumers' brand expectations are likely to be influenced by what the brand communicates to the market place through advertising and other means, the first step for a firm offering a web seal is to know the fears and concerns that consumers have as they consider making online purchases. A good understanding of consumers' concerns about online purchases can help firms ensure that the assurances provided by their seals are relevant and useful to consumers.

The paper's studies focused on the perceived fears and concerns of the online purchasers and the impact of the different brands of web assurance seals on those fears and concerns. As the paper's objective did not concern the expectation gap, there were no specific measures of consumer expectations or disconfirmation of expectations gathered from the respondents. In the absence of these measures, it is not possible to shift the paper's focus to address the...