Study On The Relationship Between Group-buying Service Quality And Customer Loyalty In Catering Industry

Group-buying is a kind of emerging business model, which gathers a certain group of customers via the Internet, to form the advantages based on bulk purchase, to negotiate with maerchants and to gain a big commodity price concession. The first group-buying website was born in November2008, in the United States, then increasingly became popular all around the world. Within this new situation, the traditional catering industry decides to collaborate with the network to give birth to a new market segment-catering group-buying. However, as the competition of catering group-buying becomes fierce increasingly, service quality defects are also growing. The total quality of catering group-buying service has declined so much and the credit of website lower than expection, which result in a lot of customers are not willing to patronage the catering enterprises again. This greatly goes against the primary goal of the enterprises to choose the network group-buying as a market tool.This study aims to explore the relationships among service quality, customer satisfaction and costomer loyalty in catering group-buying industry. The study divides the sercive quality into two parts-catering enterprise service quality and group-buying website e-service quality. Both of them will affect catering customer loyalty directly or indirectly through customer satisfaction. Firstly, literature reviews present related research results of service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This study proposed a conceptural study model and research hypothesis. Secondly, on the basis of maturity scale of service quality and expert interviews, this study revised questionnaire and complete data collection. Using SPSS]8.0and AMOS17.0software, all the research hypotheses are testified. The following four main research conclusions include:①catering enterprise service quality is structured by4factors, tangibility, reliability, differences, and interactivity:Group-buying website e-quality is structured by3factors, website design, security and customer service.②the tangibility, interactivity, website design and customer service can significantly positively influence on customer satisfaction.③The tangibility, interactivity, and customer service are no directly positively effect on customer loyalty while they can influence customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. Only the reliability and website design have a direct significant positively influence on customer loyalty.④There is no significant difference between different gender of customers while customers from different age, education level, profession and group-buying experience appear to have remarkable differences in service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. Finally, this study puts forward3main recommendations on catering group-buying service quality management advice: select the target market and focus on market segmentation; improve the service quality of catering enterpriss to strengthen the core advantages; strengthen the group-buying website quality control to innovative user experience.