Effects of user’s primary need on relationship between e-loyalty and its antecedents

Abstract

Many people now use websites as their sole source of news and information, and more and more people use the Web to search for and buy products and services. Loyal users are equally important for all types of websites, but at times the studies have acknowledged that depending on the website characteristics users’ loyalty perception differs i.e. relationships between e-loyalty and its antecedents vary across websites. Despite these acknowledgements, very limited study, if any, has done the comparative analysis of the relative importance of e-loyalty antecedents across different website categories. This study aims to examine the e-loyalty and its antecedent’s relationship across three different categories of websites, namely product website, service website and social networking website. Website categorisation is done on the basis of users’ primary need. The study helps to determine what antecedent should be given closer attention for enhancing loyalty in the respective category. The findings suggest that e-service quality, perceived value, e-trust, e-satisfaction, number of members and number of peers, contributes to generate e-loyalty but with varied significance for different websites. Perceived value, e-service quality and number of peers are the most significant contributor of e-loyalty for product website, service website and social networking website, respectively. Structural equation modelling (SEM) analysis is used for performing empirical analysis using AMOS 20.