Switching Costs and Influence on Customer Loyalty in the Online Shopping Market.

Science the online market become a new channel to contact with customers as long as the industry value of online channel increases year by year, scholars extended their research scopes to the issue of online market. When satisfaction-loyalty linkage has not been enough to explain why customers stay in certain stores, it is much more important to research the effectiveness of switching costs and the underlying dimensions of switching costs. When a customer considers switching supplier from one to another, he will compare the revenue and costs of switching, if the costs he will pay higher than the revenue he will take, the customer will influence by switching costs and choose to stay. However, the past researches almost focused on brick and mortar market but seldom discussed online switching costs. We intend to measure it in the online-shopping market. As usual, six dimensions have been proposed and examined: (1) lost performance costs; (2) uncertainty costs; (3) pre-switching search and evaluation costs; (4) post-switching behavioral and cognitive costs; (5) setup costs; and (6) lock-on costs. The result shows that switching costs positive influence customer loyalty, customers in the online market especially care about three of the six dimensions:(2) uncertainty costs; (3) pre-switching search and evaluation costs; (4) post-switching behavioral and cognitive costs. Managers can develop business strategies through switching costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]