The Internet has created a fundamental shift in business and consumer behaviors that is similar to the shift that arose during the Industrial Revolution [15]. Internet marketing involves using the Internet to provide information, to communicate and to conduct transactions. The Internet is a ubiquitous information platform that allows internal and external customers to reduce costs for both firms and end users [34] and [39]. It allows different businesses to enter the global market and provides corporations with opportunities to become mass customer-oriented, reduce marketing costs, foster closer commercial relations via greater coordination among distribution channels, facilitate business information-gathering, increase corporation popularity through improved communication among different social groups, and improve customer services and customer–corporation relations. Therefore, most firms have started developing marketing strategies for the web [8].
The Internet increasingly makes the marketing function responsible for supply management. The customer becomes the starting point for marketing activities for multiple reasons. Customers have increasingly diverse needs and can influence each other in terms of what to buy, when to buy and how much to buy [38]. The customer is a very powerful and important factor in web-based markets.
To enter and become successful in e-marketing, building a suitable website is a requirement. For this reason, many organizations have created websites to communicate with their existing customers and to attract new customers. Iranian saffron companies face challenges in foreign markets, such as forming a brand and introducing it to foreign markets, allocating a large enough budget to market research and marketing activities to develop consumption markets and recognize consumer needs, and the selling of counterfeit “Iranian” saffron; above all, prime foreign competitors use information systems that can decrease their costs, especially for market research [2], [3] and [16]. Therefore, e-marketing is very useful for Iranian commercial saffron companies. This study investigates the effect of website content dimensions on e-marketing effectiveness via e-trust in commercial saffron corporations.