Intensifying online loyalty! The power of website quality and the perceived value of consumer/seller relationship
Abstract
Purpose
Stimulated by trends in group purchasing and online social communities, consumers are changing their shopping behavior and increasingly turning to websites for their shopping needs. The purpose of this paper is to investigate how website quality influences shopping websites to create value for the customer and promote loyalty among customers, as well as moderating effects of online shopping experience.
Design/methodology/approach
This study collected data from 275 respondents for testing against the proposed research model by means of the partial least squares (PLS) path modeling. ADANCO software was used to assess the reliability and validity of the measurement model, conduct an analysis of the goodness of model fit for the overall model, and test the hypotheses through structural modeling.
Findings
Empirical results demonstrate that system quality and electronic service quality (e-service quality) have a significant positive effect on the perceived value of consumer/seller relationship; the perceived value of the consumer/seller relationship has a significant positive effect on online loyalty; online shopping experience does not exert a moderating effect on the relationship between website quality and the perceived value of consumer/seller relationship.
Originality/value
This study applied the PLS path modeling approach using ADANCO variance-based structural equation modeling software to verify that website quality plays an important role in distinguishing a brand from other brands in e-tailing, making it an essential factor of a shopping website’s business success. This study further verified that the amount of previous online shopping experience a consumer has does not interfere with the positive influence that website quality exerts on the perceived value of the consumer/seller relationship. The above indicates that it is imperative for website managers to adopt online shopping experience of consumers as a market segmentation variable so as to enhance website quality, increase the perceived value of consumer-seller relationships, and win consumer loyalty.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan for providing financial support (NSC 102-2410-H-011-019-MY2) and the master student Chih-Ying Chu (from the Department of Information Management, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology) for providing general affairs support for this research.
Citation
Tsao, W.-C., Hsieh, M.-T. and Lin, T.M.Y. (2016), "Intensifying online loyalty! The power of website quality and the perceived value of consumer/seller relationship", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 116 No. 9, pp. 1987-2010. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-07-2015-0293
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2016, Emerald Group Publishing Limited