An Exploratory Study of the Formation and Impact of Electronic Service Failures

Abstract

E-commerce service failures have been the bane of e-commerce, compelling customers to either abandon transactions entirely or switch to traditional brick-and-mortar establishments. Yet, there is a paucity of studies that investigates how such failures manifest on e-commerce websites and their impact on consumers. This paper therefore synthesizes extant literature on e-service and system success to arrive at a novel classification system that delineates e-commerce service failures into information, functional, and system categories, each with its own set of constituent dimensions. Extending expectation disconfirmation theory (EDT), we further distinguish among disconfirmed outcome, process, and cost expectancies as major consequences of e-commerce service failures. A theoretical model of e-commerce service failure classifications and their consequences was constructed together with testable propositions that relate the three failure categories to consumers' disconfirmed expectancies. Finally, we explore the validity of our theoretical model based on descriptive accounts of actual occurrences of e-commerce service failures and their corresponding consequences. Consistent with our theoretical model, information and functional failures were found to be associated with disconfirmed outcome and process expectancies respectively. System failures, on the other hand, do not affect consumers' disconfirmed expectancies, thereby contradicting our predictions. Post hoc analysis on constituent dimensions of information, functional, and system failures yielded additional insights on the preceding observations.

Incomodando consumidores: quando agentes de recomendação não facilitam a nossa vida realmente

“…Adams, 1965;Walster et al, 1973;Bitner et al, 1990;Smith et al, 1999) or e-commerce failure (i.e. Tan et al, 2016) may be inappropriate to define recommendation failure precisely. Together with this deficiency comes another related problem, which is to understand how this failure in providing good recommendations is perceived by the user.…”

“…They believe that "system success, in the context of e-commerce transactions, is rooted in the capacity of self-service applications to deliver a rewarding customer service experience on a consistent and recurring basis" (Cenfetelli et al, 2008). Tan et al (2016) recently focused their attention to service failure in e-commerce, since this is a very sensitive determinant of sales success. They define e-commerce service failure as a "negative event that occurs whenever the e-commerce website is incapable of offering the necessary technological capabilities essential for a consumer to accomplish his/her transactional activities and/or objectives" (Tan et al, 2016, p. 3).…”

“…They define e-commerce service failure as a "negative event that occurs whenever the e-commerce website is incapable of offering the necessary technological capabilities essential for a consumer to accomplish his/her transactional activities and/or objectives" (Tan et al, 2016, p. 3). Tan et al (2016) reported three groups of e-commerce failures: (i) informational failure; (ii) functional failure; and (iii) system failure. The authors argue that information failure "is a major deficiency of e-commerce websites and that it occurs whenever information provided on an e-commerce website hinders consumers in accomplishing their transactional activities and/or objectives" (Tan et al, 2016, p. 6).…”

“…Complementarily, Tan et al (2016) define a second type as functional failures, those considered "to have occurred whenever functionalities provided on an e-commerce website are incapable of supporting consumers in accomplishing their transactional activities and/or objectives". The five forms of functional failures identified by them are needs for recognition failure, alternatives identification failure, alternatives evaluation failure, acquisition failure and post-purchase failure.…”

“…A more thorough attempt to look at failures in online shopping is made by Tan et al (2016). Their work established important parameters to the analysis of failure in electronic services.…”