Research On The Formation Mechanism Of Website Customer Intimacy

With the development of online shopping, website customer intimacy has been attachedmore and more attention. Some scholars have begun to learn the research of intimacy in socialpsychology to study website customer intimacy. Previous studies have shown that, people areable to develop and maintain online intimacy. Despite the lack of a clear definition andmeasurement of customer intimacy, this term is still widely used in the academic and businesscommunity. In the face of increasingly fierce competition and the diversification of customerneeds, how to maintain customer loyalty and retain customers have become an importantproblem enterprises facing today. The customer intimacy related research provides a way forthe enterprise to meet customer needs and maintain customer loyalty. But the current researchon the customer intimacy is relatively lack. The existing research still has a number ofshortcomings and gaps, especially the research of website customer intimacy under thenetwork environment is even less. What is the strict concept of website customer intimacy, thestructure of website customer intimacy contain what, and what is the relationship betweenwebsite customer intimacy with the existing relationship structures based on trust,commitment and loyalty. All these issues need further research.Therefore, this paper started following researches from three aspects: First, learning fromthe theory of social psychology, interpersonal relationship theory and relationship marketingtheory to define the concept of customer intimacy. Besides, this paper reviewed the relatedliteratures about the measurement of intimacy. And combined with interviews with consumerswho have online shopping experience, this research determined the website customerintimacy measurement items, and further developed the website customer intimacymeasurement scale, and tested the reliability and validity of the measurement scale. The resultsshow that the website customer intimacy measurement scale has good reliability and validity,the website customer intimacy constitute dimensions include website understanding, websitecloseness, website care, website information-discourse and website empathy. Finally, thispaper builds a formation mechanism theoretical model about website trust, websitecommitment, website loyalty and website customer intimacy, and conducts an empirical teston theoretical models and hypotheses. The results show that website trust have positiveinfluence on website customer intimacy, website customer intimacy influence website loyaltythrough website commitment, website trust and website commitment are the antecedent ofwebsite loyalty.The innovation points of this paper are:(1) This research defines the definition ofcustomer intimacy and develops out the measurement scale, which is the first time measures customer intimacy under website environment. The website customer intimacy measurementscale which includes five dimensions: website understanding, website closeness, website care,website information-discourse and website empathy has good reliability and validity.(2)Thispaper takes website customer intimacy as the research objective, which has not been found inprevious studies and extended the customer intimacy between B2B to website shop andcustomer.(3)This paper establishes the theoretical formation mechanism model betweenwebsite trust, website loyalty, website commitment and website intimacy, which is the firsttime to put these four variables together in study and detailed analysis of the relationshipinfluence path of customer intimacy between the four variables. And the study also enrichesthe trust and commitment theory system.