Customer expectations in online auction environments: An exploratory study of customer feedback and risk

The importance of understanding the needs of the customer is a widely-accepted pre-requisite to providing quality products and services. For product purchases through traditional channels, customers are known to have expectations for the product they are buying as well as for the services associated with its purchase. Online transactions, in which the buyer has no prior knowledge of the seller, are becoming increasingly common and are fraught with risks not present in traditional channels. Feedback about sellers in these risky markets contains a mix of product-related and service-related comments. This exploratory study identifies preliminary relationships between customers’ emphases on product or service dimensions of quality in their feedback and the risks to which the customer is exposed.