Effects of E-ServQual in Creating Customer Loyalty Toward Online Marketplace in an Emerging Country

Abstract

Nowadays, customers are used to shopping at online marketplaces as the results of information technology advancement and the value-added services offered by these platforms. Due to the intense competition, online retailers should maintain the overall e-service quality to gain customer loyalty. Online shopping is considered a risky activity as there are several cases related to the product quality, transaction security, and violation of data protection act. These risks may lead to customer disappointment, which later reduces the customer's willingness to remain loyal to the online retailers. Despite this, customers may hold different uncertainty avoidance level, which may influence their evaluation toward e-servqual and satisfaction toward online shopping. The purpose of this study is to investigate the effect of e-service quality on customer loyalty via customer satisfaction and to test the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance in the relationship between e-service quality and customer satisfaction. Samples of 302 e-commerce customers over 17 years old were selected using purposive sampling technique. The collected data was analyzed using PLS-SEM to test the hypotheses. The findings showed that e-servqual had a significant positive effect on customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. Unlike the proposed hypothesis, this study failed to prove the moderating effect of uncertainty avoidance in the relationship between e-servqual and customer satisfaction.