An Empirical Research On The Impact Of Customer Trust On Loyalty In S-Commerce

In recent years, with the development of e-commerce and social media, social commerce (s-commerce) has gradually become one of the most important extends of e-commerce. However, empirical research on s-commerce has just begun. As an extension of e-commerce, there are also consumer trust and loyalty issues in social commerce. The factors that will affect customer trust of social commerce and the relationship between trust and loyalty are worthy of research. Therefore, this study built a model on social commerce trust and loyalty and will verify the relationship between trust and loyalty by empirical research.This paper built the research model by doing an extensive reading on existing literatures. Trust was devided into two aspects and was affected by seven factors. Loyalty was measured by attitude loyalty and behavior loyalty. Based on this model, data was collected by online questionnaires and through data analysing, the correlation between the factors was validated.The results showed that in social commerce, recommenders’ability, benevolence/integrity,recommendtionamounts have significant influences on consumer’s trust to recommendation. Social commerce website’s reputation, quality and safety have significant influences on consumer trust to the website. Consumers’trust to recommendation and consumers’ trust to the website will affect consumers’attitude loyalty and behavior loyalty. The study also showed that the size of the website would not affect consumer trust. In addition, the study analysied the control variables represented by customer individual characteristics and found that age, occupation and income will have some influence on the trust and loyalty. Finally, based on the findings, this paper made recommendations on marketing practice for social commerce merchants.