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Consumers often encounter issues of perceived ambiguity and performance risk when attempting to evaluate experience goods being offered online. Sellers try to alleviate this knowledge gap often seen in a medium of low naturalness by engaging in effective compensatory adaptation. This research theoretically looks into three primary aspects of compensatory adaption and their potential in securing communication of high-quality information between the online seller and consumer.

Utilizing survey data and structural equation modeling, this study tests the effectiveness of different aspects of compensatory adaption to alleviate the knowledge gap in a medium of low naturalness.

Drawing on media naturalness theory and the tripartite model of attitude, this paper identifies three theoretical components that significantly affect the effectiveness of compensatory adaption. They are information retrieval capability from the cognitive/logical aspect, information richness from the affective/audiovisual aspect and interactivity from the behavioral aspect. The effectiveness of compensatory adaptation proves to have a positive impact on perceived information quality.

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper in the information systems literature to examine the compensatory adaptation tools for effective transfer of information. This study contributes to the academics by providing three handles to improve effectiveness of compensatory adaptation toward information quality. We focus on three compensatory adaptation tools in cognitive/logical, affective/audiovisual and behavioral aspects, and this compensation perspective leads to three practical factors that affect effective transfer of information between online sellers and consumers. The result of this study complements the nomological network of the enablers and impediments of e-commerce.

In traditional point‐of‐sale (POS) systems, an in‐house database server processes all sales transactions it receives from local client computers. Such systems incur high costs because of operational requirements, such as professional maintenance, the sophisticated server hardware required, and scalability requirements. For small retailers that want to use POS systems but have relatively limited financial resources, these expensive operational requirements are big obstacles. Considering these issues, the purpose of this paper is to suggest a POS system that is adequate for small businesses.

Using a simulation method, the authors tested and compared the operational performance of POS systems in two different environments, i.e. the remote server‐client environment and the local server‐client environment.

One possible solution is for a group of small retailers to use a shared, remote database server, but such servers often have reliability and performance issues. To resolve these issues, the authors suggest a POS system that utilizes local data tables embedded in each client's computer. This system consists of a remote database server and a group of client POS computers with off‐line data‐handling capabilities. The results indicated that it is possible for small businesses to obtain significant benefits from an affordable POS system based on a remote client‐server model that utilizes a local data cache.

The results of this study indicated that small businesses may obtain significant benefit from the affordable POS systems based on a remote client‐server model that utilizes a local data cache.

The literature lacks studies on small businesses' accessibility to POS systems. The study fills this literature gap and shows a technological solution to provide affordable POS systems to small businesses, which have not been paid much attention by POS vendors.