The Effect Of Website Quality On E-loyalty: The Mediating Role Of E-satisfaction And The Moderating Role Of Customer Characteristics

Being different from traditional brick-and-mortar business, e-commerce spends more to acquire customers, and the time period needed to become profitable is much longer. Due to this unique mode of profit of e-commerce, websites have to create a larger customer amount and make profits from repeat visits and exchanges of loyal customers. Generally speaking, customer loyalty is an economic necessity in Internet age. The concept of e-loyalty was proposed at the beginning of 21 century, and the researches focusing on e-loyalty have been developing correspondingly since then.In e-commerce, Website has been as a platform for interaction between customers and online retailers. The website quality customers perceived and customer characteristics have effect on customers' purchasing intention and customers' loyalty to website. This thesis adopts the etailQ developed by Wolfinbarger and Gilly(2003),and four dimensions of website quality was proposed such as website design, customer service, fulfillment/reliability, and security/privacy. The characteristics of customers in this research mainly include technology readiness, trust propensity and risk perception. Based on the theory of reasoned action, the main point of this study is to test the relationship between website quality and e-loyalty and explore the mechanism that how website quality affect e-loyalty. Questionnaires are conducted in the participants from corporations and governments and schools who have purchased something on e-commerce website in a recent year in Hang Zhou.The major results are described as below:1. Every dimension of website quality has positive correlation with customer's satisfaction toward website; customer's satisfaction toward website has positive correlation with e-loyalty; Every dimension of website quality has positive correlation with e-loyalty.2. The effect of website quality on e-loyalty is mediated by customers' satisfaction toward website. Customers' satisfaction toward website fully mediate the effect of website design and customer service on e-loyalty, while partially mediate the effect of reliability and security on e-loyalty.3. The relationship between customers' satisfaction toward website and e-loyalty is moderated by customer characteristics. The relationship between customers' satisfaction toward website and e-loyalty is positively moderated by technology readiness and trust propensity, while this relationship is negatively moderated by risk perception.