Services have continuously been growing and over the last years have become an increasingly important part of the worldwide economy (Kanso and Kitchen, 2004; Margetts, 2012). More importantly, with rapid developments of interactive marketing communications service quality, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty are increasing becoming the determinants of business success factors in the service sector (Parasuraman and Grewal, 2000; Caruana, 2002, Aksoy et al 2012). Particularly, when the production of service delivery is associated with communication, customer relationship and people intensiveness, customer evaluations of the service quality become even more critical when crossing boundaries (Kanso and Kitchen, 2004). In recent years, multi-channel customer contacts such as self-service web chat, phone, and email points of customer interaction modes are in focus (e.g., Cooper et al 2009; Robertson, 2012) to enhance customer service experience and satisfaction. Although marketing academics and practitioners agree that identifying suitable communication channels is vital for company’s long term success, there is an on-going debate in the literature whether this integrated multi-channel communication platform is right for the customers and is effective for service quality, customer service satisfaction and loyalty in this turbulent and ever changing global environment. Realistically, not all customers have the same level of technological skills or prefer using the same communication vehicle. As marketers remain concerned whether to standardise customer communication channels or not, a need arises to understand customer choices of their preferred communication interaction and type of communication contact. Therefore, there is a need to pay a greater attention to the determinants, which might have an impact on the relationship between customers’ communication mode choices and service quality as well as between customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. This paper aims to fill the aforementioned gaps by combining various elements into the theoretical model and providing a more complete picture of the interconnectedness of the elements of multichannel communication contacts from a process and technology perspective. Thus, a theoretical framework for modelling the determinants of customer choice of communication modes should be of interest for international and global services companies.

Online shopping is significantly increasing worldwide and is showing a continuous potential in terms of growth, security, price and shopping convenience. It was noticed that 65% of online shoppers browse for products online every day and this activity has become customer’s part of their everyday life, which is an advantage for second hand online retailers (Wares, 2012). The trend emerging for purchasing second hand goods from online retailers has also shown an increase recently (Sharman, 2012). Second hand online shopping is one of the industries that everlastingly remain unaffected even if it undergoes any economic circumstances (Heller, 2011). USA and UK are the leading countries of second hand online shopping with most sales being incurred from early years. Considering the newly advanced BRIC countries, both China and Brazil are famous for second hand online shopping and are expecting to undergo a constant increase in the near future. Russia and India had a very slow growth of second hand online shopping from the year 2004 and remained slow, but increased during recession and will incure higher sales by early 2014 (Rueter, 2013). Thus, the question arises - what makes second hand goods sold online from unknown online retailers valuable? The answer might be found in the notion of perceived value that has become an important construct within the e-business framework because of such an easy access to online retailers. If customers perceive the value of second hand goods sold by the unknown online seller as high, they are more likely to enter into the transaction with that retailer. The company’s reputation also plays an important role here as it represents an asset to the owner and customers would trust the seller because of that asset (Kirmani and Rao, 2000). This asset turns out to be even more important when it becomes hard to evaluate the seller in cases of purchasing services or when shopping online. This study examines effects of antecedents on perceived value of second-hand goods sold online. Specifically, the study uses the data from an online survey collected across various countries. The data suggests significant effects of antecedents on perceived value of goods sold by second-hand online retailers.