All's well that ends well: Effective recovery from failures during the delivery phase of e-retailing process

Abstract

E-commerce retail has been on an exponential growth since late-1990s and now with COVID-19 crisis it is more popular and prevalent than ever before. But failures during the e-retailing process, specially when the business is under pressure, is a severe challenge with deteriorative impacts on customers' attitude and behavioral intention. While the majority of failures during e-retail process takes place at the ‘product delivery phase’ (the last phase of e-commerce process), little attention has been paid towards investigating how e-retailers can effectively recover from service failure encounters during the delivery phase. Seeking to address this gap, the present study draws on cognitive dissonance theory to examine the determinants of effective recovery from service failure encounters during the delivery phase of e-retailing. In doing so, a scenario-based experiment was conducted to collect data from 320 online customers. The findings provide empirical insights on how perceived recovery endeavor interacts with criticality of situation and brand equity to mitigate the negative consequences of service failure at delivery phase. The theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed along with avenues for future research.