Service product configurations in electronic business-to-consumer operations a taxonomic analysis of electronic food retailers

The authors develop a taxonomy of electronic service products, defined as bundles of physical goods, offline services, and digital content. The taxonomy is founded on a conceptual classification scheme in the form of a 2 × 2 matrix - namely, the electronic service product structure - that differentiates electronic service products according to their digital content (either static or dynamic) and target market segment (either unique or broad). The cells of the matrix correspond to four categories of service products: niche market (static content-unique market), market extender (dynamic content-broad market), dynamic mass market (dynamic content-broad market), and customized megamarket (dynamic content-unique market). Two hypotheses are proposed that posit that the ordering of the service product categories in the sequence that was just stated will be positively associated with customer satisfaction and loyalty. The results of the empirical analysis of data from 255 electronic food retailers, the study sample, support the two hypotheses.