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ABSTRACT
Previous studies on e-commerce have focused on the influence of the online website environment on purchasing decisions but rarely examined online brand loyalty from perspectives of brand trust and brand affect. Though antecedents of brand affect and trust have received attention, the relationship among these antecedents, brand affect and brand trust still remains unclear. Therefore, this study views website environmental design and website interactivity as the independent variables, brand trust and brand affect as the mediators, and brand loyalty as the dependent variable to construct a conceptual model. We choose online bookstores as the research sample and conduct Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the hypotheses. Study result shows that website environment design and interactivity will generate higher brand loyalty through an increase in brand affect and brand trust. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are provided in the final section.
Keywords: Website Environment Design, Website Interactivity, Brand Affect, Brand Trust, Brand Loyalty
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1. INTRODUCTION
As e-commerce springs up, the virtual channel has eliminated constraints of time, space, and cost that exist in traditional bricks-and-mortar. However, the existing online environment also exposes consumers to uncertainties and risks, requiring certain mechanisms to retain customers in the long run [40]. While mercurial customers nowadays offered with diverse choices online spend less and less time or efforts at a specific stop, how to sustain their attentions and repeat purchasing behaviors online has come to be one of the challenges of profit-oriented marketers. Brand loyalty therefore has received great attention during the past decades whether online or offline. It is believed that loyalty can transform customer relationships into business value and reduce marketing costs [9].
The importance of the customer-brand relationship has come to prominence thanks to the uncertain and competitive online marketing environment. While a large number of online stores provide hundreds and thousands of products at lower operating costs, consumers are able to be more easily enjoy shopping with lower product prices, rapid procurement, and interactive services at home. However, some constraints of online shopping are still under examination. In addition to the security issue that has so far been argued, consumers may feel it difficult to determine a product or service value in the absence of...