How to Make E-Commerce More Successful by Use of Kano’s Model to Assess Customer Satisfaction in Terms of Sustainable Development

Abstract

Personalization, mobility, deliveries on the same day, and perhaps artificial intelligence—all of these elements will shape e-commerce in the near future. It is necessary to consider what features and standards online shops will have to meet in order to achieve success and to adapt to the changing preferences and requirements of the customer and their awareness of the perception of the environment through the prism of, for example, sustainable development. This means there is a need to specify a set of attributes that will influence the decision to use the services of a given e-shop. Despite all efforts, many online shops fail because they do not meet the expectations of customers. At the same time, meeting customer expectations is a big challenge for newly emerging e-shops. There are many studies on sustainable development in e-commerce, but there is no specific methodology for e-shop design, especially in the aspect of sustainable development. The authors propose a methodology based on Kano’s model and customer satisfaction to explore customers’ stated needs and unstated desires and to divided them into different groups with different impacts on customer satisfaction. In this paper, a case study on the attributes of customer satisfaction for a newly opened e-shop with organic products, which is to operate in the countries of Central Europe and takes into account selected assumptions of sustainable development, was presented. The research took the form of an original (authorial), universal survey that can be used in other similar research. A total of 1069 correctly completed surveys were taken into account for the analysis. Respondents indicated 16 must-have features for the e-shop in order to make customers benefit from its services and 11 one-dimensional features that will determine the level of customer satisfaction. Among the must-have features, there were those related to sustainable development, which indicates the environmental awareness of potential customers. The obtained results were given to the management of the research e-shop and were included during the design of its operation. After one to two years of e-shop operation, the results will be verified.