Relations Perspective Network-based Customer Loyalty Research

For years, scholars were always devoted to studying on the development of customer loyalty. Previous studies most based on the experience of past transaction, thinking that customer satisfaction is an important driven factor to form customer loyalty and confirmed by a lot of empirical research. Therefore, customer satisfaction is considered as the primary measure to obtain customer loyalty. However, a large number of later empirical research found that many defecting customers claimed that they were satisfied with previous brand they made deal with, at the same time, a lot of dissatisfied customers showed loyalty behavior. Relationship Marketing experts pointed out that customer commitment is the deep-seated psychological motivation of customer loyalty, representing the highest stage of relationship establishment. Therefore, this paper based on a relationship perspective to explore the influencing factors of customer loyalty in the online retail environment.Based on the previous literature review of related research, this paper introduce customer trust, customer commitmet to build conceptual model of online customer loyalty. Then adopt previous scales to measure four variables of this paper:customer satisfaction, customer trust, customer commitment and customer loyalty. Then collect data by questionaires survy, test hypothesis by the mean of statistic analyse.The result shows that customer satisfaction has a significant positive relation with customer trust and its two dimensions, namely credibility and benevolence. So online customer satisfied experience can significantly enhance customers' trust on online vendors. Customer satisfaction has a more significant positive relation with credibility than with benevolence. Customer trust has a significant positive relation with customer commitment and its two dimensions, namely continuance commitment and affective commitmet. However, the affect on affective commitment is far more significant than on continuance commitment. Customer trust, customer commitment and customer satisfaction all affect customer loyalty significantly and positively. Customer trust's affect is most significant, customer commitment second and customer satisfaction last. Among them, customer satisfaction, affective commitmet and customer trust all affect behavior loyalty significantly, affective commitmet and customer trust affect attitude loyalty most significantly. In this study, behavior loyalty is ma inly measured by repeated purchase and recommend intention while attitude loyalty is measured by first choice, resistance to change and price tolerance. It is thus clear that customers'satisfied experience increase the likehood of future purchases, and affective commitmet reduce the possibility to terminate the trading relationship in the future to lock customers in the business. Customer trust is essential to bulid customer loyalty, but continuance commitment does not have significant affect on customer loyalty. This may be because that it is easier for online customer to transfer from one online vendor to another one, what's more, online cutomer locked mechanism does not act effectively. What is different from previous study of this paper is customer satisfaction does not have significant relation with customer commitment. It infers that customer satisfaction may make customers tend to keep transaction with online vendors but will not necessarily lead to emotional connection with them.The innovation of this paper is the research based on relationship theory, explored the influcing factors of online customer loyalty from psychological level, and had a deep exploration on the relation between each variables'each dimensions.