Online Customer Loyalty

Technology is changing the way customers and companies interact. How consumer purchasing behavior is affected by the use of technologies which enable them to purchase independently of direct service employee contact - i.e., by shopping via a technological interface rather than in a brick-and-mortar shop - is of great interest to corporations.

Roberta C. Nacif investigates the behavioral consequences of self-service purchases when consumers shop via the Internet. She explores the effects that customers' assessments of service encounters experiences (attitudes) and transactional history (prior behavior) have on their subsequent purchase behavior. She analyzes two aspects of repurchase behavior: customers' decision of whether or not to repurchase from the same retailer and customers' decision about how much money to spend. The author develops a framework describing the motivations of customers to engage in relational market behavior and tests this framework with individualized customer data obtained from a major European online retailer.