Research On The Relationship Of Service Recovery And Customer Satisfaction In The Context Of Online Retailing

As the world's largest online retail market,China's online retail industry has experienced rapid growth in recent years,and the market scale continues to expand.Online shopping is slamming the traditional retailing and changing people's lifestyle with its overwhelming advantages of high availability,high quality,and low price.At the same time,as a supportive industry,the courier service industry has been booming,and its capability to serve e-commerce has been continuously improved as well.Express delivery has gradually become another basic need in the nation beyond clothing,food,housing and transportation.However,while maintaining low-cost rapid growth,the problems of online retailing and courier services began to emerge.Due to the fierce competition in the industry,express delivery companies use to sacrifice service quality in order to maintain lowcost competitive advantage,and as a result,service errors and failures occur frequently.The low-cost strategy adopted by online retailers to attract customers also leads to numerous complaints from customers about third-party courier service failures since those online stores also tend to choose logistics providers with lower prices in order to cut cost.This outstanding online retail industry has its natural flaws.Generally consumers always have to build connection with a number of third-party service providers in addition to contact with the seller.During the process of receiving services from the third parties,small or even big mistakes are inevitable.Although we might believe that the third-party service failures are caused by the third party and therefore they should be responsible.Actually in the online shopping process,the courier service failures may result in the disruption of the entire online shopping chain,and also due to the limited complaint channel from the third-party courier,online shopping consumer often choose to appeal and complain directly to the online store,which means most of the time the online store have to bear certain consequences and costs for third-party service failures.As the scale of online shopping customers tends to be stable,the cost to develop new users is getting higher and higher,and the strategy of attracting consumers by low prices will gradually become ineffective,then consumer satisfaction and stickiness become more critical.As a result,when third-party courier service failure happen,how can the online store restore customer satisfaction through its service recovery has become an issue that online retail operation must face and deal with.Therefore,based on the perspective of service recovery paradox and the insights of equity theory and signal theory,this paper constructs a conceptual model of research through the mediating role of perceived justice and the moderating role of signal credibility to identify the relationship between service recovery and customer satisfaction,and to discuss the mechanism path for online store to reverse the situation,turn failure to success,and reimprove customer satisfaction by offering service recovery in the case of third-party courier service failure.During the empirical research,this paper released questionnaires to collect data,and used SPSS and AMOS for statistical analysis.The results show that perceived justice acts as a full mediator between service recovery and customer satisfaction.In addition,the signal credibility,which was measured by the online store logistics service price,has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between service recovery and perceived justice.Academically,this study enriches the discussion of service recovery paradox in the context of online retailing to a certain extent,and further expands the application of equity theory and signal theory.Practically,the research results of this paper also offers some insights and suggestions for online retailers in terms of transforming from the low price dilemma.