Examining E-loyalty Model in Social Shopping Websites: the Impact of Social Shopping Website Quality on E-loyalty Formation

The purpose of this study is to examine the formation of customer e-loyalty to a social shopping website. The formation of customer e-loyalty to a social shopping website is examined based on cognitive-affective-conative-action loyalty framework. This study proposes that customer e-loyalty is strongly associated with website quality, e-satisfaction and participation. Seven website attributes (i.e., visual aesthetics, navigation, efficiency, user friendliness, security/privacy, entertainment and community driveness) identified in previous research are employed to measure website quality that affects e-loyalty formation. There are 449 data collected from a southwestern university in the U.S., but only the responses from 333 Pinterest users are used to test the hypotheses. Exploratory factor analysis is used to identify dimensionality of social shopping website attributes, and multiple regression and linear regression analysis are conducted to test hypotheses in this study. Results of the study indicate that five significant factors including efficiency, user friendliness, security/privacy, entertainment and community driveness are directly associated with customer e-loyalty. Indeed, such website quality factors as the determinant of cognitive e-loyalty directly affect overall customer satisfaction (affective e-loyalty), customer purchase/return intention to the website (conative e-loyalty), and customer participation, positive eWOM and co-shopping (action e-loyalty). The findings of this study have provided evidence that social shopping website quality dimensions are directly associated with customer e-loyalty to the website. Also, the findings have shown important implications to ensure quality website attributes to increase customer loyalty to a social shopping website