Social Media and Service Quality in Internet Retailing: An Abstract

Abstract

The soaring popularity of social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, has changed service business surroundings. This change is largely driven by the fact that social media, as effective information tools, increase information symmetry between service providers and customers. Previous studies provide ample evidence of significant association between social media use and its marketing effectiveness. This study focuses on the relationship between service quality and social media use. It is obvious that in the relationship between service quality and social media use, information symmetry is a critical variable to be examined. If any retailers operate online stores with high service quality, they would not need to concern enhanced information symmetry by using social media. These retailers will rather want to actively use social media. On the other hand, if any retailers are struggling to provide high service quality, they will stand in the opposite position and be reluctant to adopt social media. Both online and offline service quality are expected to affect retailerst’ decision on social media use. To study the relationship between retailers’ social media use and their service quality, we sampled more than 500 retailers and studied their service quality and social use. Service quality was measured from customer review based on their shopping experience with those retailers. Both online and offline service quality was examined because Internet retailing requires offline order fulfillment as well as online order procurement. Findings show that retailers’ order procurement quality is a significant predictor of their social media use. This finding validates a clear connection between Internet retailers’ online marketing performance and their use of social media. However, a retailer’s order fulfillment quality is not associated with social media use. Previous research on information economic theory has highlighted the positive effect of information asymmetry on sellers’ opportunistic behavior. However, this research highlights information symmetry and finds empirical evidence that online service quality becomes a critical issue in the enhanced information symmetric retail context.