Although electronic commerce technology often reduces overall costs, it also creates a discontinuity in the order fulfillment segment of the buying process: the fulfillment process becomes a black box. This discontinuity means that the customer does not have complete information of the purchase affecting customer perceptions of the transaction.
Information technology provides a variety of ways for firms to make this process more visible. Providing information about the fulfillment process is expected to increase perceived justice by reducing customer anxiety, enhancing the fairness of the transaction; and ultimately improving customer outcomes, mainly customer satisfaction, service satisfaction, word of mouth and repurchase intention.
The objective of this study is to analyze the role of process visibility in mitigating this discontinuity and its impact in customer outcomes. The research method is a scenario-based experiment and factors involved are fulfillment process visibility, the presence of fulfillment problems and compensation for fulfillment problems. Also customer prior experience with online retail channels is used as a control variable. The design is a between-subjects, incomplete 2x2x2, with an unbalanced number of participants and two missing cells. The participants were 153 undergraduate business students from an American northeast university.
The results show that process visibility by itself has a positive impact on customer outcomes. Compensation and online buying experience did not show a direct impact on customer outcomes. Online buying experience moderates the impact of process visibility on service satisfaction and repurchase intention. Lastly procedural justice mediates the impact of process visibility on customer outcomes.
The major practical implication from this study is that process visibility should be taken in consideration in online designs. It is shown that process visibility alleviates the discontinuity introduced by computer mediation, making the customer more satisfied, and increasing customer outcomes.
The major theoretical implication is that it demonstrates how and why electronic commerce is different from traditional commerce. The discontinuity will also affect other behavioral aspects of electronic commerce, like trust, perceived risk, etc; and technical aspects, like business integration, web site design, etc. This research study opens a new path to be followed by electronic commerce researchers.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-08172005-173613 |
| Date | 30 August 2005 |
| Creators | Costa, Claudia Regina Macedo da |
| Contributors | Lawrence F. Feick, Vivek Choudhury, Jacob G. Birnberg, Dennis F. Galletta, Brian S. Butler |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08172005-173613/ |
| Rights | unrestricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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