Identifying opportunities for improvement in online shopping sites

• Few studies evaluate methodologies to identify what improve or offer in online services.
• Importance Performance Analysis is the most-used method to identify what improve in services.
• IPA does not considers non-linearity between performance and customer satisfaction.
• Improvement Gap Analysis, a fusion of IPA with Kano Model, considers nonlinearity.

The aim of this study is to show how different methods may provide online shopping managers with information regarding which attributes affect customer satisfaction, and how to identify what to improve or offer in the market. For this purpose, 409 Brazilian users of online shopping answered questionnaires, evaluating 26 attributes. These attributes are grouped on five dimensions: Accessibility, Fault recovery, Security, Flexibility, and Interaction/feedback. The present study evaluates different actions suggested by Importance Performance Analysis (Martilla and James, 1977; Slack, 1994) and Improvement Gap Analysis (Tontini and Picolo, 2010), exploring the limitations and strengths of each method. The results show that Improvement Gap Analysis overcomes the limitations of Importance Performance Analysis, related to the nonlinear relationship between attribute performance and customer satisfaction.