Marketing and Branding Research

Abstract

In e-commerce industry while most of the transactions happen electronically, logistics activities are still required to ship products to end points. Firms that operate in e-commerce industry should consider logistics as a critical success factor if they want to be successful in operations. Studies show that customers choose strong brands in e-commerce to get better logistics service.  Main purpose of this research is to examine the consequences of logistics service quality on brand factors considering e-commerce industry. To this end, for brand factors including quality (PQ), brand loyalty (BL), and brand trust (BT), and logistics service quality (LSQ), a literature review is made. According to this literature review, a survey is prepared and sent to e-commerce website users via email and online survey software. The originality of this study lies on the investigation of how perceived logistics service quality affects perceived quality, brand trust, and brand loyalty from the e-commerce perspective for the first time. As an exploratory study that links logistics service quality with brand, the study investigates how logistics service quality characteristics, namely timelines, order condition, information quality, personal contact quality, ordering procedures, ordering release quantities, order accuracy, order quality, and order discrepancy handling affect brand factors as perceived quality, brand loyalty, and brand trust. To that end, the data collected based on responses from 193 online shopping website users. Based on the factor analysis results, 6 groups are identified for LSQ. The results indicated that logistics service quality has an impact on perceived quality and brand trust and it has no impact on brand loyalty. At the end, implications of these findings for managers and directions for future research are presented.