Influence of perceived quality of university official website to perceived quality of university education and enrollment intention

E-commerce marketing channel is a media that fully mediated by information technology, depriving the intrinsic attributes of services, and creating information asymmetry. Information asymmetry can reduce consumer ability to evaluate services effectively, hence posing a challenge to service providers. Signaling theory provides a framework for understanding how extrinsic attributes (signals) can be used by service providers to communicate the information quality of services to consumers. This paper proposes a model to investigate how the quality of a university official website acts as a signal of quality of university education as commercial service. This research divides university website quality into several dimensions: Reliability, responsiveness, functionality, ease of use, information quality, and visual appeal. Questionnaires are distributed to third year students of senior high schools around Jakarta to observe the quality of university website based on those dimensions. Based on our analysis, it can be concluded that the quality of a university website influences the perception of the quality of university education, which eventually affects the intentions of prospective students to enroll to the university.