A Study of Factors Affecting Loyalty:A Regression Analysis in Online Environment

The rapid growth of technology and increase in penetration of internet has posed a big challenge to companies for selling their products online. High customer acquisition cost and minimal switching costs for customers made the competition very tough among the online companies. Hence, online stores in order to survive and to be sustainable they must have a very strong base of loyal customers who are willing to revisit their stores. However, to retain customers in online environment is far difficult than the brick and motor stores as there is no physical interaction between seller and buyer. Online customers get affected by different aspects which influence their willingness to return to the website in future. Therefore, it is very important for etailers to find and understand those factors which influence customer loyalty. The main objective of this study is to identify the critical factors which determine e loyalty. E-service quality, e-perceived value and e- trust are examined in on line business to customer (B2C) context, in order to understand their relationship among each other and their influence on e-loyalty. For this study data was collected from respondents living in selected cities of Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and Chandigarh. For data collection a self-administered questionnaire, whose reliability and validity was established, was sent through E-mails and Facebook profiles of the respondents in the month of October to December 2016. Out of around five hundred people only 223 responses were found valid. Further linear Regression Analysis was used for the analysis of data. Results show that e-Trust, e-Perceived value and e-service quality are positively related and predict e loyalty.