Scale Purification and Validation: A Methodological Approach to Sustainable Online Retailing

Abstract

Sustainability in the e-commerce business has created an overwhelming interest among practitioners and researchers. The different business models adopted by the e-retailers in India lack sustainable aspects, hindering them from generating sustainable revenues. To accomplish such goals, e-retailers need to focus on sustainable factors such as trust, innovation, timely delivery of goods, usability, internet speed and customer support service. In view of this, the article is aimed to create an instrument that captures sustainable online retailing by developing, measuring and empirically validating a scale. The validity of the scale was established by adopting a proper psychometric scale development procedure. The study found that after applying various judgmental and statistical criteria to the initial scale of 26 items, 17 items were retained with the removal of nine items sequentially at different steps. The dropped items could not meet the set thresholds of different criterion. Results of the study suggested that trust and internet speed in the present context are key determinants of sustainable e-retailing. The study focused on the online retail sector only. Methodological developments in other areas might lead to different results if the chosen criteria were to be repeated there. Both judgmental and statistical procedures need to be used with proper consensus. The practical implications of the study involve five constructs that e-marketers and practitioners could adopt to provide better customer experience resulting in higher customer satisfaction. The authors demonstrated a detailed procedure for scale purification. This procedure will help researchers in this area and in adjacent disciplines build greater consistency regarding applying methodological steps in scale purification. It will also assist reviewers and editors with tools to identify methodological errors while making review decisions. Such a scale will help in bringing standardization of the research carried out in sustainable online retailing.