E-Service quality and customer satisfaction in online shopping: Implications for sustainable digital commerce

The rapid growth of e-commerce has intensified competition among online retailers, making e-service quality increasingly important for building customer trust, satisfaction, and sustainable customer–platform relationships. This study examines the relationships among e-service quality, customer trust, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty using a second-order Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) framework. The five SERVQUAL dimensions such as empathy, responsiveness, reliability, assurance, and tangibles were modeled as first-order constructs reflecting the higher-order construct of service quality. Data were collected through an online questionnaire from 402 respondents with prior online-shopping experience. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and SEM were employed to assess the measurement and structural models. The measurement model demonstrated satisfactory reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, and overall model fit. The structural results showed that service quality significantly and positively influenced customer trust and customer satisfaction, while customer trust significantly enhanced satisfaction. Trust also partially mediated the relationship between service quality and satisfaction, indicating that e-service quality improves satisfaction both directly and through increased customer confidence. The SERVQUAL dimensions contributed positively to overall service quality, with responsiveness and assurance showing particularly strong contributions, while empathy exhibited a comparatively moderate contribution. In contrast, customer loyalty had no significant direct effect on trust or satisfaction, and its indirect effect on satisfaction through trust was also nonsignificant. These findings demonstrate that reliable, responsive, secure, and well-designed digital services are important for strengthening trust and satisfaction in competitive e-commerce environments. By identifying trust as a key mechanism linking multidimensional e-service quality with customer satisfaction, the study contributes to SERVQUAL and digital-commerce literature and provides implications for the economic and relational sustainability of e-commerce platforms through more resilient and durable customer relationships.