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Prior research has shown that after receiving online services of varying quality, customer expectations are eitherpositively disconfirmed(i.e., services exceed customer expectations) ornegatively disconfirmed(i.e., services fall short of customer expectations). The present research examines expectation disconfirmation across national cultures and its subsequent impacts on e-word-of-mouth, e-satisfaction, and e-loyalty. The results show that Chinese customers are more tolerant of e-services that result in negative disconfirmations, although online shoppers from the United States are more likely to be loyal or generate positive e-word-of-mouth when experiencing positive disconfirmations. Suggestions for adjusting multinational e-tailers’ strategies to better serve customers across national cultures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Online retailers constantly strive to improve customer satisfaction. However, satisfaction levels can vary significantly across cultures when customers experience mixed quality 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 thinkers), 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, providing superior quality on each individual service attribute may be more important to achieving satisfaction for customers from Western rather than Eastern cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]