A Taxonomy of Service Failures in Electronic Retailing

Service failure and recovery have been extensively investigated in the bricks-and-mortar environment, and there is a growing body of empirical research exploring service failure and recovery in the electronic environment. The present study addresses a gap in the literature by developing a taxonomy of failures applicable to both product-oriented transactions (e.g., online purchasing of books, apparel, electronics) and service-oriented transactions (e.g., online banking, online stock trading, online reservation services). Using the critical incident technique (CIT), we content- analyzed 243 customer-reported unsatisfactory incidents to refine a deductive taxonomy of failures identified from the literature. The final taxonomy developed in this study offers insights into the types of failures that are applicable to product-oriented and service-oriented transactions.