The Effect of Customer Service and Content Management on Online Retail Sales Performance: The Mediating Role of Customer Satisfaction

This paper analyzes the mediating role of customer satisfaction by studying the relationship between IT-enabled customer service and content management efforts and online sales performance. Using data on the top performing Web retailers in the U.S. based on their online annual sales, we show that the extent of retailers’ efforts in online customer service and content management is positively linked to customer satisfaction, which in turn is positively related to the retailers’ online sales performance. In addition to directly increasing the revenue, our results indicate that customer service and content management features can also indirectly improve the retailers’ financial performance. Specifically, customer service management impacts the sales performance via the average ticket amount, while content management affects the sales via the repeat visit