Dysfunctional Customer Behavior in Cross-border E-commerce: a Justice-affect-behavior Model

E-commerce has become one of the major consumption patterns currently. Understanding consumer e-commerce shopping behavior helps to improve the competitiveness of enterprises. The purpose of this study is to examine service justice as the antecedent factor of dysfunctional customer behavior (DCB) and how it interacts with negative emotion and service dissatisfaction, which in turn, affect DCB. The study utilizes an online survey to obtain data from 490 Taobao.com users after the well known whistle-blowing incident against Taobao counterfeits. The partial least square method of structure equation modeling is employed to test the proposed research model. The results indicate that service justice has a negative significant correlation with negative emotion, and negative emotion significantly induces service dissatisfaction. Finally, both negative emotion and service dissatisfaction are positively correlated with DCB. Knowledge about cross-border e-commerce DCB is scarce. This study is based on customer justice theory to provide empirical evidence about the factors influencing DCB perpetrated on Taobao’s shopping website. Implications and future research are further discussed.