Differences in Customers’ Online Service Satisfaction Across Cultures: The Role of Thinking Style Lei Song, Srinivasan Swaminathan, and Rolph E. Anderson Department of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA Online retailers constantly strive to improve customer satisfaction. However, satisfac- tion levels can vary significantly across cultures when customers experience mixed qual- ity services, that is, services with a mixture of high and low quality service attributes. Based on two studies, we find that Westerners (e.g., European Americans) react more negatively than East Asians (e.g., Chinese) toward mixed quality online services. Our findings show that due to differences in thinking style, Westerners (analytic thinkers) are more likely to focus on negative service attributes than East Asians (holistic thin- kers), who tend to consider the amalgam of high and low quality service attributes as an integrated whole when forming their overall perceptions and levels of satisfaction. Moreover, the results suggest that for online retailers marketing across cultures, provid- ing superior quality on each individual service attribute may be more important to achieving satisfaction for customers from Western rather than Eastern cultures. Keywords: China, e-commerce, service quality, thinking style, United States Service quality is a critical antecedent of customer satisfaction, which drives firm profits (Anderson & Mittal, 2000). As online retail firms expand globally, understanding how customer satisfaction is derived from service quality perceptions across cultures is critically important. Estimates are that today’s global online retailers are losing more than US$338 billion annually due to consumer dissatisfaction with the services provided (Loechner, 2010) as 63% of online transactions were taken to other online and offline competitors whereas 37% were abandoned completely (Genesys, 2009). Understanding culturally different consumers’ qual- ity perceptions about online services is critical for online retailers to minimize their losses. According to Jin (2014), Chinese customers tend to purchase pro- ducts only when price promotions are available, and they do not greatly care about their online purchasing experience. Whereas local Chinese competitors (e.g., Alibaba.com) focus on providing price promotions, Amazon.com emphasizes superior service quality (e.g., set time delivery) but rarely focuses on price promotions. Partially due to the failure to understand the perspectives of Chinese consumers, Amazon.com’s market share in China declined by 47% from 2004 to 2013, whereas Alibaba.com (its major Chinese competitor) saw a market share jump of 50.4% in the same period (China Electronic Commerce Research Center, 2013). Due to the fast expansion of online retailers around the globe, 1 understanding how customers across cultures perceive service quality differently becomes an increasingly impor- tant issue for the success of these online retailers. Because online service usually involves myriad service attributes (e.g., information accuracy, intuitive navi- gation, fast checkout, and delivery options), online service providers may not consistently provide all of them at high quality levels (Devaraj et al., 2007). From Address correspondence to Lei Song, Department of Marketing, LeBow College of Business, Drexel University, 3141 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA. E-mail: ls635@drexel.edu 1 For example, Alibaba.com expanding to the U.S. market in 2013 and Amazon.com entering the South Korean market in 2014 (Choi, 2014). Journal of Marketing Channels, 22:52–61, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1046-669X print=1540-7039 online DOI: 10.1080/1046669X.2015.978700 Downloaded by [Drexel University Libraries], [Lei Song] at 12:24 09 February 2015