PhD thesis: Satisfying complaint handling important for e-commerce

Using knowledge of customers needs in their purchase process may provide essential insights for e-commerce strategy. The main goal of Krawczyk’s thesis is to provide insights into how online customers’ needs structured in the customer purchase process affect website development and e-commerce performance. First, Krawczyk determines the stages of website advancement based on the hierarchy of website goals. The results suggest two separate dimensions of website development, one for transactional and another for relational website functions. These results can serve as a benchmark and as a tool for screening, evaluating, designing, and improving websites.

Krawczyk also provides new theoretical and empirical insights into the relative importance of the informational and transactional functions of company websites. This is achieved by the chain of effects from website features, through informational and transactional success towards overall website and company performance. She indicates that both the informational and the transactional functions contribute to the success of websites. However, the informational function has a considerably greater effect than the transactional function.

Finally, Krawczyk finds that that negative experiences and complaints do not automatically lead to disadoption of the Internet as a purchase channel. Moreover, she demonstrates the service recovery paradox for the online purchase setting. The results underline the importance of service recovery and satisfying complaint handling for electronic commerce.