How social shopping retains customers? Capturing the essence of website quality and relationship quality

Social shopping as a result of the advancement of social media applications is increasing considerably in e-commerce. As a consequence of the multifaceted 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 conceptualisations as well as detailed empirical evidence for such phenomena in which social shopping is 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 affects commitment. Our empirical results confirm that commitment and trust partially mediate the relationship between satisfaction and purchase intention in social shopping context.

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