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The purpose of this paper is to present a proposal for the Hierarchy of Effects – a model that has been widely applied in the study of persuasion in traditional communications media – to evaluate Website effectiveness. In particular, this contribution seeks to consider a more complete model in order to evaluate the responses of the individuals to the Websites, incorporating new variables to the traditional sequence; and to study the moderating effect of the specific characteristics of the audience – the individual user's motivations in terms of Internet access in the basic structure of this model.

The multi‐equations methodology is used to test the sequence of responses that produce the visit to an experimental Website: the perceived informative value and the perceived entertainment value of a Website, the attitude toward the Website, the attitude toward the brand and the intention to buy the brand for two different individual groups: the “information seekers” and “entertainment seekers”.

The results reveal two well differentiated positive models of behavior in the online context.

In their Website strategies, the organizations should not neglect those aspects which may arouse emotional reactions in the Internet users, but they should pay more attention to generated informative value to obtain more favorable users' responses.

Previous studies had not tested empirically the moderating effects of the users' motivations in terms of Internet access (search for information versus entertainment) over this original and more complete structure of individuals' responses to the Website.

Determinants of internet adoption in industrial purchase have rarely been paid attention in the literature. Considering this gap in the literature, the present study intends to approach the factors that determine the use of the internet as a source of information in procurement.

This research analyzes whether different internet tools are used throughout the phases in the purchasing process and, at the same time, whether the characteristics of the buying situation determine the use of the internet in that process. The survey is based on an e‐mailed questionnaire sent to a sample of 103 Spanish firms.

In general, different uses of the internet tools are not observed in the different stages of the buying process. However, the characteristics of purchasing situations (novelty, complexity, perceived risk, time pressure and personal stake) at each buying situation make possible an explanation of the use of different internet tools throughout the different phases in purchasing.

The results of this paper show that there are implications for practitioners related to the core hypotheses of the research. The contingency approach employed in the study makes it easier to adapt the different internet tools (web pages, intranet development or adoption of videoconference technology) to the specific characteristics of the buying situation in which they are primarily used. On the other hand, the main limitation of this research lies in the composition of the sample, so that it could be considered suitable to extend the study to different product lines and to decisions on service contracts in the near future.

This research analyzes whether different internet tools are used throughout the phases in the purchasing process and, at the same time, whether the characteristics of the buying situation determine the use of the internet in that process.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the behavioral and affective loyalty of retailer customers in order to establish the role played by loyalty programs in the development of these variables.

Research data were taken from a survey carried out on 750 customers from a Spanish supermarket chain. Several ANOVAs are employed to compare the two loyalty dimensions among participants and non participants in loyalty programs.

The results show that participants in loyalty programs are more behavioral and affectively loyal than non participants. Nevertheless, most customers do not change purchase behavior after joining a loyalty program. The strategy is therefore to retain loyal customers and to achieve the reinforcement of affective bonds linking the customer to the retailer.

Companies should focus their efforts on developing a reward plan as adapted as possible to concrete needs of each participant in the program to achieve true loyalty.

The main contribution of this paper is the completion of an exhaustive analysis of customer loyalty. On the one hand, it is a pioneer in the study of the influence of loyalty programs on affective loyalty and, on the other hand, it confirms results from other researches on behavioral loyalty of program participants. In addition, this is one of the few papers developed in this field using the survey as a source of information.