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Purpose – This study aims to theorize and empirically examine the relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate”, “website satisfaction and conversion rate” and “purchase intention and conversion rate”. E-Commerce conversion rate represents the percentage of visits to an e-tailer’s website that includes a purchase transaction. Despite the importance of conversion rates for e-tailers, prior research predominantly used purchase intention and website satisfaction as main dependent variables and implicitly assumed that these variables will influence the actual purchase. Design/methodology/approach – Data on 85 US retail websites were used to test the hypotheses. The unit of the analysis is the online retail website. Regression analysis was used to perform the data analysis. Findings – The results indicate that both purchase intention and website satisfaction positively influence conversion rates. It was also found that website satisfaction positively influences purchase intention. Research limitations/implications – Only data from 85 US e-tailers from the top-100 US online retailers are used to test the hypotheses. Also, conversion rate is only one of the several important success metrics used by e-tailers. Originality/value – This study not only examines antecedents of e-commerce conversion rates, but also theorizes and tests if there is a statistically significant relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate” and “website satisfaction and conversion rate”. This is because, although previous studies used purchase intention and website satisfaction as main dependent variables and proxies for actual purchase behavior, they did not validate this relationship. This study shows that: there is a statistically significant relationship between “purchase intention and conversion rate” and “website satisfaction and conversion rate”, there is also a statistically significant relationship between “website satisfaction and purchase intention” and this study used firm-level data to theorize, measure and analyze the data, whereas prior literature used only individual-level data.

In this study, we examine how environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) activities differently affect firm value depending on a firm’s financial characteristics. The qualitative aspect of ESG activities, which is not reflected in ESG scores, is valued in the market based on a firm’s financial characteristics and is the motivation for the present study. We conducted empirical analyses employing multiple ESG score sets obtained from two different ESG evaluation institutions for the recent four-year period. We found that ESG performance has a positive effect on firm value, though some variations occur across the ESG element types, which is consistent with previous results. The positive effect is more pronounced in firms with higher profitability or foreign ownership, which implies that ESG activities can have a greater impact on firms with a strong financial ability to sustain these activities or those with disciplined foreign investors to monitor transparency. These results are robust to the two-stage least squares analysis to capture the reverse causality between ESG performance and financial variables. Our findings suggest that to maximize the effect of ESG activities, firms need to build market confidence through financial efforts, such as enhancing profitability and attracting foreign investments.

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