Electronically enabled 'Many to Many 'exchange/communications11
Information Richness and Real-Time Interactivity for Pre-Purchase Deliberation11
Merchant (Retailer) Brokering Agent12
Quality of the Online Retailer: Attributes and Dimensions13
Intrinsic Quality: Focusing on Retail Business Operation Attributes15
Conceptual Framework of the Pre-purchase Deliberation Process in an Online Marketplace Context23
Intention to Transact as a Consequence in the Pre-purchase Deliberation Process.24
REFERENCES27
Chapter 2: Literature Review
This chapter will give an overview of literature and models that are related to the research problem presented in the previous chapter. This chapter will introduce the concepts of customer satisfaction, service quality, relation between customer satisfaction and service quality, traditional service quality dimensions, online service quality dimensions and service quality model of online retailing in order to give a clear idea about the research area.
Customer Satisfaction
There are two principal interpretations of satisfaction within the literature of satisfaction as a process and satisfaction as an outcome. Early concepts of satisfaction research have typically defined satisfaction as a post choice evaluative judgment concerning a specific purchase decision. The disconfirmation paradigm in process theory provides the grounding for the vast majority of satisfaction studies and encompasses four constructs expectations, performance, disconfirmation and satisfaction. These covered common crucial characteristics in service delivery and that the determinants of satisfaction were therefore similar in each case. For the customer perceptions and production realities, they listed elements which were then judged along a continuum. The customer perceptions included purpose, motivation, result, salience, cost, reversibility, and risk. The production realities related more to elements such as technology, location, content, complexity and duration. These two dimensions can be compared to the customer's perception of a Web site and the complexity or speed of the technology involved. The third dimension of provider characteristics relates to the expertise, attitude and demographic attributes of the staff. These two types of service quality, and summarized four aspects of quality which affect customers' perceptions:
(1) Technical quality;
(2) Integrative quality;
(3) Functional quality; and
(4) Outcome quality.
Technical quality refers to the skills of the personnel and design of the service system. In e-commerce, these two aspects are hidden from view and are not experienced directly and therefore cannot be judged by the customer. Integrative quality is concerned with how the different parts of the service delivery system work together. This is crucial in e-commerce because the customer must have a positive experience online and if relevant a positive experience offline. For example, if a customer buys a product through a company's Web site, then a smooth running system will correctly translate that order and payment, and deliver the product as promised. The third aspect is functional quality which means the manner in which the service is delivered.
Outcome quality is when the actual service meets the promised service and the customer's needs and expectations. This is true in the case of e-commerce just as much as for businesses in the physical world. If a customer is dissatisfied, he or she is unlikely ...