The Effect of Online Service Retailers' Quality Gaps on Customer Satisfaction

The growth and expansion of e-commerce warrants more attention. Online service retailers (OSRs), as e-commerce retailers, continue to invest in the improvement of services provided to their online consumers. The success of OSRs depends heavily on their capability to understand any service quality gaps, and their ability to mitigate these gaps. Using a conceptual framework for OSRs, this study identified nine quality gaps of these retailers and their influential mitigation strategies. A survey instrument was developed and used to measure the significance of the nine quality gaps in terms of customer satisfaction with online shopping. The sample size was 4,937 completed responses from different demographic and product categories. The data analysis was carried out using structural equation modeling (SEM). The results showed that tactile feedback, delayed acquisition, delivery reliability, confounding technological trust, transaction security, wirelessness, buyers' remorse, and confounding knowledge technology significantly affect the satisfaction of online shoppers.