The Effect of e-Service Quality, e-Satisfaction, and e-Loyalty on Consumers’ Online Repurchase Intentions during Pandemic in Turkey

Abstract

The internet is an essential medium for business. Recently, e-commerce uptake in Turkey has increased rapidly worldwide, primarily due to the Pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV2 virus (COVID-19). As a result, the service quality of online shopping platforms has become a distinct competitive advantage tool for online companies. The main questions to be addressed in this article are: How e-service quality affects consumers’ buying behavior? and which dimensions of e-service quality are more important drivers of their choices? Accordingly, this research examines the effects of the dimensions of eservice quality, e-satisfaction, and e-loyalty on consumers’ online repurchase intentions. This study also aims to determine the difference between the behaviors of customers before and during the Pandemic. One of the crucial outcomes of the analysis is the increase of online shopping during the pandemic cycle compared to previous years. Secondly, the study has shown that the most critical dimension of e-service quality is reliability. As the reliability level increases, repurchase intentions increase as well. When the e-satisfaction variable was added to the model with the hierarchical regression analysis, both reliability and e-satisfaction levels had a statistically significant effect on online repurchase intention. When e-loyalty was added to the model as a third variable, both e-satisfaction and e-loyalty significantly dominated the model. The third outcome shows that before the Pandemic, consumers mainly used online shopping platforms for the clothing product category, but online shoppers mostly preferred the food product category during the pandemic cycle. The last findings indicate that the most used online shopping platform before the Pandemic was Yemeksepeti.com, but this title switched to Trendyol. © 2022 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.