Whether our Virtual Commercial Environments are Polite enough or not? An Instrument for Gauging the Degree of Politeness in e-Tailers

Politeness issues in virtual commercial contexts received rare attention from both practitioners and researchers. This work developed an instrument for gauging degree of politeness in online retailers’ storefronts. The instrument’s reliability and validity were confirmed through empirical data analysis. A second-order confirmatory factor analysis revealed that online consumers' tendency in paying relative more attention to their rights being respected and gaining useful information while they are assessing online retailers’ politeness. Using the instrument, online merchants and 3rd-parties can measure the degree of politeness in online retailers. In addition, patrons’ tendency in paying more attention to particular factors while they were evaluating the politeness guides online merchants to allocate limited resources more efficiently. Besides its practical applications, this work sets a stage for future studies trying to investigate the relationships between the politeness construct and other constructs such as customer satisfaction, trust, repurchase intention, profitability, and others that interest business administrators.