An exploratory analysis of website quality in the agrifood sector: The case of extra virgin olive oil

Besides verifying the current consistency on the Internet of websites set up by Sicilian (Southern Italy) EVO oil firms, this paper aims to verify their e-service quality by evaluating which main quality features, as derived from the literature, they have. To process the data, descriptive statistics were used, which allowed detection of the presence/absence of the variables examined. The study found 280 websites with some qualitative gaps. Findings highlight that EVO oil firms do not exploit the potentialities of the web adequately. They often use the Internet as a communication and promotion tool, but only to a lesser degree for e-commerce. The results may be useful to both agrifood managers, in formulating marketing strategies to improve online business performance and designing a successful e-shopping environment, and to academic debates, since they generate empirical information about the adoption of e-marketing strategies by agrifood firms. To the best of our knowledge, no studies have specifically verified the e-service quality of websites in the EVO oil sector. There are very few attempts that analyse a sample of agrifood firms (among which there are olive oil firms) and their web marketing strategies.