ServiceFriday: Winning Online Shoppers’ Trust With Signs of Quality

E-commerce platforms such as Amazon offer essentially anything and everything a person could want or need within a few clicks of the mouse, or a few taps on a smartphone. Yet despite all of the convenience of online shopping, customers are not physically able to interact with the products prior to making a purchasing decision. Instead, customers must rely on the site’s internet-based “quality signals” such as live chat options and detailed product descriptions in order to establish trust in the products as well as the company.

Research from the Journal of Services Marketing found that signaling high quality to customers via the company’s website is critical for e-retailers to do in order for their products and services to be perceived as having value, and for customers to trust the seller. They also found that the added element of before-sale services such as interactive chats can lead to higher customer satisfaction. “Both webpages and before-sale services are positively associated with off-line perceived quality, but only the quality of before-sale service has a direct association with customer satisfaction. Webpages and before-sale services are both trustworthy signals for indicating the quality of physical products”.

The findings emphasize that before-sales services and interactivity go a long way to establish a customer’s trust. Therefore, it is important for online sellers to work toward establishing many touchpoints for before-sales communication, and to not solely focus on creating a high quality website. “On-line sellers should improve the reciprocity and controllability of communications from a buyer’s perspective and should pay more attention to the strategic role of on-line communication for improving customer service.”

To access the article from the Journal of Services Marketing, visit Emerald Insight at this link: https://bit.ly/2UFmrjg. (A fee may apply.)