THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

Service quality has been defined as the comparison between customers’ expectations for service performance prior to the service encounter and their perceptions of the service received (Asubonteng, McCleary, and Swan, 1996). When performance does not meet expectations, quality is judged as low and when performance exceeds expectations, the quality is judged to be high. 

According to Santos (2003), E-Service Quality can be described as entire customer perceptions or evaluations of electronic service experience of the online marketplace. Several different scales have been developed to measure E-service quality. WebQual scale (Loiacono, Watson, and Goodhue, 2000) is on providing website designers with information regarding the website (e.g., informational fit to task) rather than on providing specific service quality measures from a customer perspective. 

Thus it is not suitable for measuring specific service quality measures in a public sector website. Meanwhile Barnes & Vidgen’s (2002) argued that WebQual provide a transaction- specific assessment rather than a detailed service quality assessment of a website and would therefore be equally unsuited to measure website service quality in the public sector. In this research, e-service quality is the same as Webqual because it was part of service quality that specify in the online service which is website part. 

Consumers used service every day. Service is a performance that offered by one party to  another. The performance was intangible and not result the ownership of production. 

Service usually increase the comfortable and satisfaction towards the company. Mudie and Pirrie (2006) identified the following features of services: 

• Intangibility 

Intangibility is the main feature of service. Service cannot assure the quality because it cannot be counted, measured, tested, verified and inventoried in advance of sale. Most of the firms find it difficult to understand how customers consider their services and evaluate the quality of their services. 

• Simultaneous production and Consumption 

There is a marked distinction between physical goods and services in terms of the sequence of production and consumption. 

These days, companies can easily deliver their service even though the consumer didn’t go to the companies’ location. Companies only need to makes website with easy to use and informative information about the product or service that company offers to the consumers. Maintain the website for company is very important due to consumer didn’t want to wait the website that slow while loading the content because consumer will get bored and that website have negative perception in consumers mind. 

Nowadays, everyone talks a lot about the e-business and the internet as a new knowledge based in economy. E-business is using the website that provides the consumers’ with information of the product and consumers’ can compare the price immediately without spending the precious time. 

To make the e-business success, company must focus on the service and maintain the relationship with the consumers’. Companies have to attract the consumer intention to  visit and purchase for their website, by focus on the information in the website, the ease to use, and the attractive design. Also it would be better if company provide online consumer service for those consumers that having trouble or want to know further about the product.

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