Evaluation of fresh food logistics service quality using online customer reviews

ABSTRACT

Improving the quality of cold chain logistics services is a great challenge for fresh food e-commerce companies. Traditionally, the evaluation of logistics service quality has been carried out mainly through questionnaire surveys and expert groups, which are time-consuming and laborious. Unlike previous studies, in this study, we used a latent Dirichlet allocation model to explore logistics services using customer reviews on the ‘fresh food’ category of JD.com, one of China’s most popular e-commerce websites. By revising the evaluation index system for logistics service quality, we put forward an evaluation system that covers six dimensions: reliability, security, timeliness, economy, pleasantness and convenience. We then incorporated sentiment analysis technology and the TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) algorithm to obtain a total score for the service quality of JD’s fresh food logistics. This study provides a reference for other B2C fresh e-commerce enterprises on the implementation of logistics service quality evaluation and management.

KEYWORDS:

• Logistics service quality
• fresh food e-commerce
• evaluation system
• online reviews
• text mining

Acknowledgements

This study is partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.71671152. Fruitful discussion with co-authors is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partially supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant no. 71671152].