An Instrument for Measuring Service Quality in the E-commerce Environment

Service quality has been a construct of interest in strategic management and marketing research for many years. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of e-commerce service has only been recently introduced. The purpose of this paper is to develop an instrument for measuring service quality in an e-commerce context. In the current study, e-commerce service quality (ESQ) was conceptualized as a multidimensional concept consisting of information quality, website design and service responsiveness. A survey was conducted on a sample of China's college students. Using factor analysis and structural equation modeling, the ESQ measurement model was tested and validated. The ESQ measurement instrument exhibits high level of reliability and validity. E-commerce practitioners will be able to use this instrument to gauge their service quality so as to improve customer satisfaction. Because of the sample features, future research could examine the generalisability of the ESQ instrument using sample from other countries.