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Keywords
Customer services quality, Customer loyalty, Trust, Electronic commerce, Customer satisfaction
Abstract
In e-commerce, loyal customers are considered extremely valuable. Loyalty is generally attributed to satisfaction with the quality of service. Since online transactions involve many uncertainties for the customer, trust is a condition for exchange. Trust in the electronic medium - here called "e-trust" - is believed to increase online customer loyalty, but empirical confirmations are scarce. The present study empirically investigates the roles of service quality, satisfaction and trust in an e-commerce context. In the study, e-trust is found to directly affect loyalty. The e-service quality dimension of assurance, i.e. trusting the merchant, influences loyalty via e-trust and e-satisfaction. Other e-quality dimensions, such as ease of use, e-scape, responsiveness, and customization influence e-loyalty mainly indirectly, via satisfaction. Managerial implications and suggestions for further research are provided.
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Customer loyalty is considered important because of its positive effect on long-term profitability. According to Reichheld and colleagues (Reichheld et al., 2000; Reichheld and Schefter, 2000), the high costs of acquiring new e-customers can lead to unprofitable customer relationships for up to three years. As a consequence, it is crucial for online companies to create a loyal customer base, as well as to monitor the profitability of each segment (Reinartz and Kumar, 2002). However, few companies seem to succeed in creating e-loyalty, and little is known about the mechanisms involved in generating customer loyalty on the internet. In traditional service research, as well as in emerging research on e-services (Srinivasan et al., 2002; Van Kiel et al., 2004; Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2003), several antecedents of customer loyalty have been proposed. Among those, satisfaction figures prominently, and is thought to be attributable to customer evaluations of service and resulting quality perceptions. Next to satisfaction, trust has been brought forward as a precondition for patronage behavior (Pavlou, 2003) and the development of long-term customer relationships (Doney and Cannon, 1997; Papadopoulou et al., 2001; Singh and Sirdeshmukh, 2000). Trust generally decreases the perceived risk of using a service (Garbarino and Johnson, 1999). The role of trust could be even more important in...