Toward a Valid Measure of E-Retailing Service Quality

E-retailers are major players in the field of electronic commerce and their success would seem to depend on service quality, because they are selling the same products that traditional retailers sell. This article critiques Collier and Bienstock’s [5] new measure of e-retailing service quality and shows how the stages of e-retailing service quality can be more validly measured by adopting Rossiter’s [12] C-OAR-SE procedure for scale development. Collier and Bienstock`s measure is insufficiently valid because the measure (1) fails to specify the hierarchical objects that form the construct, and measures the overall object, e-retailing, wrongly by focusing on completed transactions; (2) does not fully acknowledge the hierarchy of attributes that form the construct and operationalizes these attributes wrongly as “reflective” when at all four levels they are “formed”; (3) inappropriately represents the rater entity by using college student participants; (4) employs unnecessarily numerous, often redundant, and sometimes ambiguous scale items, with Likert-type answer scales that make the observed scores managerially almost uninterpretable; and (5) tries to measure overall e-retailing service quality when it makes sense only to measure the separate quality ratings of sequential stages of the e-retailing service process. The article points out how these problems could be avoided by constructing a new measure that properly applies the C-OAR-SE procedure.