COVID-19 Pandemic! Its Impact on Online Business Service Quality and Performance

COVID-19 has revolutionized global trade and purchasing habits. As online sales and businesses recover, interest in performance improvement is also growing. Thus, the study examines how COVID-19 influences online businesses in the UK and Ghana, focusing on service quality and performance. The study additionally explored how empathy, responsiveness, reliability, and safety assurance impact online businesses. Using the partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) method, data were collected from a sample of 212 online business employees in the United Kingdom and 204 online business employees in Ghana. The results of the entire sample show that COVID-19 has a significant and positive influence on the quality of online business services. However, the overall sample shows that COVID-19 has no significant impact on the performance of online businesses, and this was also true for Ghana. In contrast, COVID-19 had a significant impact on the performance of an online business in the United Kingdom. Additionally, empathy, responsiveness, and reliability had a significant impact on performance. In the context of Ghana, safety assurance had a significant impact on online business performance, whereas, in the context of the United Kingdom, it had no significant impact.