An empirical study on the effect of e‐service quality on online customer satisfaction and loyalty

Purpose – Over the past few years, e‐commerce has become increasingly popular in China. Recent research has shown that it is widely accepted that customer satisfaction and loyalty for online purchases is lower than that for shopping in more traditional ways. How to maintain and increase the satisfaction and loyalty of online customers is a challenging issue for online retailers. The purpose of this paper is to try to understand what affects customer satisfaction and loyalty.Design/methodology/approach – A new conceptual model of customer satisfaction and loyalty in online purchases is developed, where four dimensions of e‐service quality – efficiency, requirement fulfillment, system accessibility, and privacy – are the four predictors from Parasuraman's E‐S‐QUAL. A partial least square estimation algorithm was then applied to analyze data from a sample of 164 online buyers from a range of backgrounds. Goods purchased include furniture, books, clothes, software, and digital products.Findings – The results ...