Online service quality in social commerce websites

Abstract

The popularity of SNS (Social Network Service), such as Facebook and Twitter, has created opportunities for new online business models (e-commerce). Among the new models, social commerce is a combination of two big digital trends: e-commerce and social media. In social commerce, social media assists customers with buying and selling products and services online, in the context of e-commerce. Social commerce is a more recent phenomenon and rapidly expanding in market; hence, it has not been studied as extensively. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of service quality and recovery of social commerce websites on perceived value of consumer and consumer loyalty. The survey was conducted using the Parasuraman's E-S-Qual scale and E-RecS-Qual scale. In order to collect data, respondents were solicited by email, directing them to the survey site. A total of 137 data points were collected from people who frequently use social commerce websites. Then, multiple regression analysis was conducted using SPSS version 18.0. The research evidence suggests that the perceived value and customer loyalty are affected the most by online service recovery's 'responsiveness' factor in the social commerce website. On the other hand, 'efficiency' and 'system availability' factors of online service quality were found to be not significant enough to affect the perceived value of the consumer. Furthermore, 'system availability' and 'compensation' factors of online service quality and recovery were also found to be not significant enough to affect customer loyalty. The findings of this study suggest that social commerce companies can make use of these findings by applying the associated principles in their marketing strategy. Also, the findings contribute to the extension of the literature in the application of the E-S-Qual and E-RecS-Qual scales to social commerce service quality and recovery. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.