Research On Customer Loyalty To E-commerce Platform From The Perspective Of Switching Costs

With the high-speed development of Internet information technologyand the emerging of e-commerce, people become more and more dependenton online shopping, e-commerce enterprises have the competition from theprevious single price war gradually into the platform competition period. Inthis situation, it is crucial for e-commerce enterprises to win customerloyalty. Based on the feature of bilateral user’s multi-platform access, usersoften prone to switching behavior, in order to achieve customer loyalty e-commerce platform must take into account switching costs. Therefore, it hasimportant practical meaning to study how to maintain customer loyaltythrough switching costs.After a review of previous research we found that the mechanism ofcustomer loyalty is very complex, related research can be roughly dividedinto two categories: one thinks the switching cost as moderating variables tostudy its effect on the formation of customer loyalty; the other study theswitching costs’s direct effect on customer loyalty. Based on the specialnature of e-commerce platform switching costs, according to whether theswitching behavior has occurred or not, it can been divided into twodimensions: unswitched gains and losses after switching, and then studytheir different influence on customer loyalty to e-commerce platform.Meanwhile, this paper discusses four factors that affect the user’s switchingcosts which are platform experience, alternative selectivity, interestrelativity and platform complexity, and then analyzes how the four variablesindirectly affect customer loyalty through different types of switching costs.Finally, according to the results of empirical analysis strategies are suggested in this paper, which provides a theoretical support for e-commerceplatform enterprises’ marketing activities.