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This paper aims to investigate whether customers’ perceptions of the quality and brand equity of a branded website affect purchase intentions, and to explore the mediating effects of trust and perceived risk in this relationship. Links between purchase intention and both trust and perceived risk, moderated by electronic word of mouth (eWOM), are also examined. A research model for testing relationships among these constructs based on the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework is outlined. A statistical analysis of the collected questionnaires was computed from the website of a target chain restaurant in Taiwan (T.G.I. Friday’s). Structural equation modelling (SEM) was used to examine the hypothesised relationships among the variables. The findings confirm that potential customers’ perceptions of both the quality and brand equity of a branded website affect their trust and perceived risk, and, in turn, their purchase intentions. This study also reveals the existence of a moderating effect of eWOM on ...

Social shopping as a result of the advancement of social media applications is increasing considerably in e-commerce. As a consequence of the multi-faceted phenomenon of social shopping, website managers encounter a lot of challenges in providing their quality website experience to satisfy their customers’ needs and in developing relationships among participants, and community. In short, providing excellent quality website experience is crucial to support online customers. Therefore, it is necessary to offer further theoretical conceptualizations as well as detailed empirical evidence for such phenomena in which social shopping are supported and enabled. Thus, this paper attempts to investigate the factors affecting purchase intention of social shopping including two constructs: website quality (i.e., system, information, and service quality) and relationship quality (i.e., satisfaction, commitment, and trust). Additionally we aim to identify the mediating roles of commitment and trust. The empirical results show that the perceived system and service quality are important antecedents of customer satisfaction, but not for the effect of perceived information quality on customer satisfaction. Furthermore, it shows that customer satisfaction significantly influences commitment, trust, and purchase intention, and trust in turn significantly affect commitment. Our empirical results confirm that commitment and trust partially mediate the relationship between satisfaction and purchase intention in social shopping context.

Brand contacts are a variety of elements about how customers come into contact with a brand and how they communicate their values about it to other potential customers. For the sake of cost and efficiency, brand contacts can be investigated not only from a customer perspective but also from that of the service provider. This paper thus attempts to integrate the Kano model and quality function deployment (QFD) to explore brand contact elements. The results gained from an empirical study of a hot spring hotel indicate that customers' perceptions about contact elements are mostly classified into one-dimensional and must-be attributes by the Kano model. The proposed approach contributes to the creation of attractive contact elements that have an enormous potential to further increase customer satisfaction and differentiate competitors. Moreover, along with the 10 technical characteristics obtained by the integrated approach, the customers' contact experiences are displayed through the brand contact priority g...