B2c E-commerce Customer Value And Customer Loyalty Research

In recent years, the rapid development of Internet and e-commerce (EC) not only created new commercial behaviour and economic model, but changed our living customs. Our shopping behavior has extended from traditional store to Internet store. Nowadays, the management of many e-retailers is focused on attracting new consumers and increasing the growth rate of customers instead of creating and maintaining customer loyalty. There is no doubt that creating and maintaining customer loyalty is the key to earning profit, whethr under traditional or cyber circumstances. Just as was said by Paul May(2000), customer loyalty is crucial to EC success. Therefore, e-retailers are faced with such avoidable important problems as how to construct customer relationship systematically and how to improve customer satisfaction & loyalty and create new EC model, for the sake of maintaing competition advantage of Internet store.The academic studies of CRM under the Internet circumatances are mostly done in America, where the EC there is developing rapidly. Whether its concept and theory of e-CRM still work in other countries and cultures or not remains uncertain. Most studies of e-loyalty of the B2C EC are experience summary & subjective judgement in Mainland China while the empirical studies are limited. So, for the sake of e-retailers establishing correct marketing stategies and promoting prosperity of Internet shopping market, it is of great significance to, based on foreign studies, study the mechanism and driving factors of e-loyalty under the circumstances of Chinese culture, and sum up the rules of Internet consumer loyalty behavior.Based on the relationship quality model(Crosby et al., 1990), customer value theory (Sheth et al, 1991) and transaction cost theory (Williamson, 1985), this paper mainly attempts to study the forming mechanism and driving factors of e-loyalty to Internet store. In this paper, the customer value offered by e-retailers is divided into three dimensions: functional value, process value and social value. Functional value is measured by five variables: price, product quality, information quality, convenience and service failure recovery. Process value is measured by seven variables: website design charateristics, Internet security, customization, Internet interactivity, privacy protection, Internet entertainment and operation simpleness. Social value is measured by four variables: website brand, social evading value, B2C relationship value and C2C relationship value. The frame of this paper comprises of four types of variables...