A Study On Service Failure And Recovery In Online Shopping

In the past 10 years, e-commerce had been developing very rapidly in China, but at the same time, it also brought many transaction problems partially because of its unique characteristics. How to build benign buyer-seller relationship in the context of e-commerce, and guide the e-commerce into healthy and sustainable development is of vital importance.The issue of service failure and recovery has gained the increasing attention of scholars in recent years, but few of them focused on the e-commerce scenario. On the other hand, the extension of psychological contract was recognized by many scholars, who proposed that psychological contract theory could be applied in the marketing environment due to its core principle - reciprocity.This study aimed at the issue of online service failure and recovery, innovatively adopted the psychological contract theory as the framework, coupled with several empirical methods including case study, interview, questionnaire and scenario stimulation experiment. The entire research included 4 parts: Firstly, we conducted case study, identified the content of the psychological contract of buyers and sellers, as well as the complete transaction process via analyzing 40 cases; secondly, we identified the reasons and key factors of psychological contract breach of buyers, and their recovery expectations via interviewing 15 respondents; thirdly, based on the results of case study, interviews and relevant literature, we developed a justice measurement scale in the context of online shopping, and then modified and verified it via collecting and analyzing 184 questionnaires; finally, we chose customer satisfaction, trust, repurchase intention and word of mouth as observation variables, examined the possibility of service recovery, and the effects of various recovery strategies via the scenario stimulation experiment involving 226 subjects. The results showed that the main effect of outcome justice, procedural justice and interaction justice, and the interaction effect of outcome justice and procedural justice, outcome justice and interaction justice are all significant.This study provided a new perspective to examining the issue of service failure and recovery, and explored the unique characteristics of online shopping environment. The results shed light on building benign buyer-seller relationship in the context of e-commerce, that is, when service failure occurs, the outcome, procedure, or interaction-based recovery strategies all can be helpful to recover customers' attitude and behavioral intention, and the outcome-based recovery will be most critical. Finally we proposed some suggestions for future research.