Using online food delivery applications during the COVID-19 lockdown period: What drives University Students’ satisfaction and loyalty?

Online food delivery applications (OFDA) are an emerging area of an online-to-offline (O2O) service delivery platform. In times of the COVID-19 pandemic the OFDA apps can help the restaurant and catering industry to thrive by allowing the consumers to order food from the safety of their homes. In this aspect evaluating the end-to-end service quality is an important issue starting right from the interaction with the OFDA apps for searching and ordering food to the last mile consumer experience with the delivery quality and food quality. The initial experience with the OFDA apps is captured through three mobile app attributes: visual design, navigational design, and information design. Consumer satisfaction and loyalty are considered to be the dependent variables in this study. Data is collected using an online questionnaire from 315 university students in India who are actual users of different OFDA apps during the pandemic period. Data analysis is done using a Partial Least Squares – Structural Equation Modeling approach. The findings show that satisfaction is the greatest predictor of loyalty, followed by food quality. Among the mobile app attributes information design has the highest impact on both satisfaction and loyalty, followed by navigational and visual design respectively. Based on the results appropriate theoretical and practical implications are discussed and suggested.