The antecedents of customer satisfaction and its link to complaint intentions in online shopping: An integration of justice, technology, and trust

Complaint behaviors are critical to maintaining customer loyalty in an online market. They provide insight into the customer’s experience of service failure and help to redress the failures. Previous studies have shown the importance of customer satisfaction as a mediator for complaint intentions. It is important to examine the antecedents of customer satisfaction and its link to complaint intentions. Online shoppers are both buyers of products/services and users of web-based systems. Trust also plays a critical role in forming a psychological state with positive or negative feelings toward e-vendors. In this context, there are three major concerns: justice, technology and trust. This study proposes a research model to combine these issues, in order to investigate complaint intentions. Data were collected from an online survey wherein subjects were encouraged to reflect on recent service failure experiences. The results from testing a structural equation model indicate that distributive and interactional justice contribute significantly to customer satisfaction and, in turn, to complaint intentions, but procedural justice does not. Technology-based features and trust are also important in determining the two target variables. The implications for managers and scholars are also discussed. © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.