Enhancing the Competitiveness of Organic Food Shops Using SERVQUAL Scale

This study focused on perceived consumers’ level of service quality and customer-perceived innovativeness, because we verified that the level of service quality, and customer-perceived innovativeness have impacts upon the consumers’ purchasing intention. Also, this study focused on which sub dimension in SERVQUAL heightens consumers’ purchasing intention. Because we expected that these results offer important clues for enhance the competitiveness of organic food stores. And other purpose of this study to explore the relationship model among consumers’ perception of organic food shop (e.g. level of service quality), direct interest for organic food (e.g. innovativeness), and purchasing intention. We expected that this result revealed that the consumer’s perspective for organic food and organic food shop. We tested our hypothesized model within a structural equation modeling (SEM) framework utilizing path-analysis implementedusing the AMOS 18.0 software and found that it fit very well with the observed data. As shown, the results of the full model (structural and measurement models) indicated fit indices: χ² =39.492, degree of freedom=25, provability level=0.033, RMR=0.047, GFI=0.948, AGFI=0.906, NNFI=0.958, CFI=0.984, RMSEA=0.060. The effect of service quality on purchase intention, service quality on innovativeness, and innovativenesson purchase intention was significant, respectively. These results showed that the effect of organic food shop’s service quality and the effect of perceived innovativeness for organic food were very important. Therefore, these results suggested that if they want to achieve organic food shop’s competitiveness, then they try to heighten the quality of serve as well as actively promoting innovativeness for organic food. We examined the statistical significance of the mediation effects using the Sobel test (see Mackinnon et al., 2002) and found further evidence to support service quality and purchase intention by innova