Impact of Service Quality on Customer Loyalty in Clothing E-commerce Industry

With the rapid development of the Internet, e-commerce has become the preferred shopping channel for consumers, especially during the pandemic. E-commerce can bring many benefits for consumers and online shop owners. In recent years, the service quality has been highly concerned by academic and practical circles. Although there are literatures on the impact of service quality on customer loyalty in the service industry, there are few research on clothing e-commerce industry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of service quality of clothing e-commerce on customer loyalty via customer satisfaction in the Philippines. This research did not only use 5 dimensions of SERVQUAL Model (Parasuraman et al., 1985) to measure service quality, but also introduced the stimulus-organism-response model (Mehrabian and Russell,1974) as a theoretical foundation to connect service quality to customer loyalty through customer satisfaction. The online questionnaire survey was conducted on consumers living in the Philippines who bought clothes online, and there were 320 respondents who answered it online survey. The data were analyzed via SEM by Jasp, and the reliability tests, correlation, linear regression, mediation analysis were done by Jamovi. The research result revealed three key findings. First, service quality is composed of five dimensions, namely, tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy, which positively impact customer satisfaction in clothing e-commerce. Second, customer satisfaction greatly influences customer loyalty. Third, customer satisfaction significantly mediate relationship between service quality and customer loyalty. This study will help online shop owners to understand that online service quality can be improved through the five dimensions. By enhancing online service quality, they can gain customer satisfaction and subsequently customer loyalty, which indirectly increases sales and competitiveness. In addition, this is supposed to be the first study to examine this topic in the Philippines, which can make some contribution to clothing e-commerce industry.