The role of website quality and social capital in building buyers' loyalty

DOI码：

10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.07.005

发表刊物：

International Journal of Information Management

项目来源：

"71571177 71571169"

关键字：

Information quality, System quality, Service quality, Social capital, Loyalty

摘要：

Buyers’ loyalty is critical for the success and survival of any online seller. Prior research regards social capital as an important determinant of an individual’s behavior. However, current knowledge on how social capital is built in the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) e-commerce context is incomplete. Drawing on signaling theory and social capital theory, this study proposes a model to investigate how sellers’ website quality (i.e., information quality, system quality and service quality) affects the development of social capital between buyers and sellers, which in turn improves buyers’ loyalty in the C2C online shopping context. Data collected from 307 buyers on TaoBao, China’s largest C2C online shopping platform, was used to empirically test the research model. The results indicate that not all of these three dimensions of website quality are positively related to cognitive and structural capital. Furthermore, although cognitive and relational capital are positively related to buyers’ loyalty, structural capital is not associated with buyers’ loyalty. Our findings bridge the literature gap about the formation of social capital in the C2C ecommerce context by demonstrating how website quality dimensions exert different effects on cognitive and structural capital. For online sellers, the results suggest that they should strategically offer appropriate website quality dimensions to build social capital with buyers in order to maintain buyers’ loyalty.

备注：

We gratefully acknowledge the excellent comments and suggestions made by the review team members. The research is supported by the grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC: 71571177, 71571169)

合写作者：

Chen, Xiayu, Huang, Qian*, & Davison, Robert M.

学科门类：

管理学

文献类型：

J

卷号：

37

期号：

1

页面范围：

1563-1574

ISSN号：

0268-4012

是否译文：

否

发表时间：

2017-01-01

发布期刊链接：

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2016.07.005