E-Commerce Service Quality and Customer Loyalty: The Mediating Role of Customer Trust

Abstract

In ecommerce, customers can click away to another retailer, so it's essential that they find the service they provide to be of high quality and that their platform can be trusted. Primary focus of this study was to find the impact of the service quality of ecommerce on customer loyalty and to check whether customer trust acts as a mediator between them or not. It was a quantitative research design and data was gathered from the 300 consumers who had been purchasing products via online shopping platforms over last six months on a structured questionnaire. The following factors were used to measure service quality: website usability, delivery reliability, responsiveness, security, customer support. Descriptive statistics were used for data analysis, the Cronbach alpha was used to assess the internal consistency of the scores, correlation analysis was performed to determine the association between the two variables, multiple regression analysis was performed to examine the influence of both variables, and mediation analysis with Hayes' PROCESS Model 4 and bootstrapping was used to determine the mediating role of the two variables. The findings indicated that service quality of e-commerce had a significant positive influence on customer loyalty and those of customer trust on customer loyalty and trust on customer loyalty had a significant positive influence. The influence of service quality on loyalty was partially mediated by customer trust. The study indicates that online retailers can create loyalty through delivering reliable service, and that they can turn that service into trust, and provides practical advice on where to put the money.