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 indicate that efficiency and fulfillment have positive effects on customer satisfaction, and fulfillment and privacy have positive effects on customer loyalty. However, the remaining factors have no significant effect on either customer satisfaction or customer loyalty. In addition, customer loyalty is positively affected by customer satisfaction. Originality/value The paper finds that the service quality must be analyzed from different aspects only to find that the requirement fulfillment has relatively great effect on customers' satisfaction and loyalty, the system accessibility has no effect on both, the efficiency has positive effect on customers' satisfaction and the privacy has positive effect on customers' loyalty. As these results are inconsistent with previous research achievements to some extent, this paper tends to provide some explanation.