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Introduction
The business-to-customer (B2C) online market has been growing rapidly and changing business patterns over the past several years. In the USA online retail sales are estimated to have grown from $172bn in 2005 to $329bn in 2010 ([51] Johnson, 2005); thus, electronic marketing activities have drawn a lot of attention. E-commerce changes the business pattern, with manufacturers, distributors, and customers using the internet as a tool for communication, and transactions have been creating new platforms for a competitive strategy ([15] Celuch et al. , 2007). Therefore an understanding of how consumers leverage the features of the internet to make purchasing decisions in the e-commerce environment would help managers devise suitable marketing strategies ([110] Wu and Lin, 2006).
Online shopping exhibits different characteristics from traditional shopping ([11] Burke, 2002; [36] Eroglu et al. , 2003; [60] Koernig, 2003). Online shopping can offer greater product selection, accessibility and convenience without the restrictions of time and space ([10] Brynjolfsson and Smith, 2000). There are also fewer tangible and intangible transaction costs in an online shopping process, such as product searches, price comparisons and transportation, which result in higher shopping convenience values ([8] Blake et al. , 2005; [20] Childers et al. , 2001; [44] Grewal et al. , 2004) than those of traditional shopping. Customer loyalty has been recognised as one of the important factors in creating profitability for companies. However in online environments it is more complicated to establish a social connection between firms and customers due to the lack of a physical environment, social distances between companies and customers ([93] Schijns, 2003) and anonymous and automated shopping contexts ([47] Head et al. , 2001). Furthermore consumers can compare competing products and services with minimal expenditure of personal time or effort, which results in competitive business markets and lower brand loyalty ([99] Srinivasan et al. , 2002). Therefore, this study intends to explore the determinants of loyalty in an online shopping environment.
Customer perceived value has recently received considerable attention in the field of marketing strategy ([106] Ulaga and Eggert, 2006). This is because it plays an important role in predicting purchase behaviour ([19] Chen and Dubinsky, 2003), achieves sustainable competitive advantages ([58] Khalifa, 2004; [71] Lindgreen and Wynstra, 2005), and affects relationship management ([90] Payne