Abstract

With the rapid growth of the internet, electronic commerce has become accepted as one of the major purchasing channels for consumers. As more and more consumers search for and purchase products through the internet, intra-industry competition of electronic commerce has become fierce. Therefore, electronic commerce service providers pay attention to factors that prevent existing customers from leaving there services in the service failure situation. In this regard, electronic commerce service providers should make service recovery efforts for consumer recovery satisfaction after service failure. In this study, we suggest that procedural justice, interactional justice, distributive justice and authenticity have positive impacts on recovery satisfaction. In addition, we also propose that involvement plays moderating roles in the relationships between procedural justice, interactional justice, distributive justice, authenticity and recovery satisfaction. We collected empirical data for this study over a period of two weeks from subjects who had service failure recovery experiences through electronic commerce. A total of 224 complete and valid responses were obtained. We carried out data analysis using a two-step methodology with SPSS 20.0 and SmartPLS 2.0. The first step in the data analysis was to establish the internal consistency, convergent validity, discriminant validity of the constructs. In the second step, we examined the structural model. The empirical results support the proposed model and partly identify the moderating effect of involvement differences. The moderate effect results show that procedural justice, distributive justice and authenticity have different impacts on recovery satisfaction in two groups. Cognitive factor such as the procedural justice and distributive justice have stronger impacts on recovery satisfaction in the high-involvement goods than in the low-involvement goods, while emotional factor such as authenticity has a stronger impact on recovery satisfaction in the low-involvement goods than in the high-involvement goods. We expect that this result will provide researchers and managers who are interested in electronic commerce service failure recovery with useful theoretical and practical implications.

Keywords

• electronic commerce;
• elaboration likelihood model;
• justice;
• authenticity;
• involvement;
• recovery satisfaction;
• repurchase intention;
• recommend intention;
• service failure;
• service recovery