Service Quality Measurement and Competition Strategy Analysis of Online Shopping
ABSTRACT
E-Commerce refers to such business behavior as conducting trades on a virtual network through the Internet. The core elements contributing to the success of online stores include not only the web-based presentation and the low-price strategy but the quality of online service as well. Importance-Performance Analysis is a method frequently used to evaluate performance and analyze competition strategies. Using IPA, this study analyzed and investigated the service quality of the online shopping of a case company and proposed 10 indexes to measure the service quality of online shopping. a number of suggestions on competition strategies were provided for the case company to improve its competition strategies.
Introduction
In the face of the diverse online shopping models adopted by consumers,existing online businesses must focus on and get to know consumer demands.Moreover, they must strive to increase the browsing rate and the re-visit rate of their websites, so as to convert such visits into actual transactions and make profits. For new online shopping businesses, the competition in the online market is fierce because the threshold of entering the market is low. Therefore, they need to achieve an accurate market orientation and division and prevent their products or management models from being imitated in order to create their strengths in the competition.
E-commerce refers to such business behavior as conducting trades on a virtual network through the Internet. E-commerce is classified according to the scope of the enterprise function and the category of the client. Common classifications are as follows:
(1) Business to Business (B2B): B2B is an interaction between enterprises that connects the suppliers, customers, and relevant enterprises sharing the same objective. The supply chains are combined through the Internet to engage in enterprise resource planning management, which can save costs and increase efficiency.
(2) Business to Customer (B2C): B2C refers to an enterprise’s marketing for its customers. An enterprise puts its products onto the Internet and sells them online. Apart from offering adequate information and interfaces to attract customers, it enables customers to order products on the Internet.
(3) Customer to Customer (C2C): In most cases, the seller and the buyer are not wholesale businesses. With the aim of selling their objects, they do business in a trade market of a specific type. The website operator does not offer logistics services but establishes a trade platform for the gathering of products. The seller and the buyer follow the transaction procedure.
(4) Customer to Business (C2B): The product dominance is given by businesses to customers. Consumers form a community according to demand and then seek business opportunities through the collective price negotiation of the community. The C2B model focuses on replacing the traditional shopping center crowded with suppliers with a demand aggregator.
According to Zeithaml, Parasuraman & Malhotra, the core elements contributing to the success of online stores include not only the web-based presentation and a lowprice strategy but the quality of online service as well. Rust and Kannan believed that the services offered by online stores are no long confined to the delivery of a transaction order and the immediate response to customer problems; a real online service is supposed to provide customers with an experience of information interaction and is taken as an approach to enhance consumer satisfaction and loyalty.
Importance-Performance Analysis is a method frequently used to evaluate performance and analyze competition strategies. Using IPA, this study analyzed and investigated the service quality of the online shopping of a case company. The research results could be utilized by the case company to improve its competition strategies.
