| The enterprise’s long-term development is inseparable from loyal customers, and how to attract customers and retain customers has been of concern to businesses and scholars. Since the rise of the Internet development, the scale of online shopping have maintained rapid growth, e-retailing is becoming an enterprise business model. However, in the Internet environment, lower search costs, lower switching costs and lower diversity of online retailers make it more difficult to retain customers than the traditional environment. Therefore, in the network environment, how to retain customers and improve customer loyalty has become an important research topic for the managers and scholars.In the research of customer loyalty, service quality has been an important prior variable, which has a significant impact on customer loyalty. In the various dimensions of service quality, service reliability has occupied an important position, which is a key dimension of servie quality. Service reliability requires businesses to fulfill the promised service accurately and timely and avoid mistakes as far as possible, and service reliability is also essential for companies to retain customers. Therefore, under the conditions of limited resources, how to improve loyalty turns into how to improve the service quality, and how to improve the service quality turns into how to improve service reliability. However, most related studies just consider service reliability as one dimension of service quality and compare the importance of service reliability with other dimensions of service quality, while few scholars study service reliability individually.However, in order to improve customer loyalty, online retailer needs to understand the mechanism of how service reliability affects customer loyalty, especially how each dimension of service reliability affects customer loyalty.This paper aims at the online retailers which sales the real products, and have the consumers who buy the product online once upon a time as the sample, to explore the relationship among the online retailer service reliability, customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer loyatly by using SPSS17.0and PLS. In this study, we first establish the key dimensions of E-tailing service reliability. Based on service quality questionnaires previously developed by other researchers, including offline and online, we developed a new questionnaire to explore dimensions of E-tailing service reliability. Five dimensions of E-tailing service reliability are established and validated:product conformance, information reliability, customer service reliability, website reliability and logistics reliability. Next, to understand how each dimension of E-tailing service reliability affects customer loyalty, we did a field survey to collect data and test the hypotheses. Partial least square and structural equation modeling were used to analysis the data and detect the mediator variables and relationship between service reliability and customer loyalty.Our results show that product conformance, information reliability and customer service reliability have a direct impact on customer loyalty. Customer satisfaction and customer trust both have a complete mediating effect on the relationship between product conformance, customer service reliability and customer loyalty. Customer trust has a partial mediating effect on the relationship between information reliability and customer loyalty. Finally, considering both the direct and indirect effects, product conformance has the most significant impact on customer loyalty, followed by customer service reliability, information reliability, website reliability and logistics reliability.Based on the findings, managerial insights are provided,so that online retailers can take advantage of the limited resources to improve the customer loyatly from the perspective of service reliability. This paper also open up a new research direction of customer loyalty. Finally, this paper propose the future research directions. |
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