Website Service Quality and Shopping Website Stickiness: The Mediating Effect of Website Involvement

Website service quality has been considered to be important to increase users’ stickiness toward website in online shopping context. However, the underlying mechanism through which website service quality can influence shopping website stickiness remains unclear. In this study, the concept of website involvement was introduced to explain why people tend to favor sticking a shopping website. Also, four dimensions of website service quality (i.e. recovery, reliability, personalization, and responsiveness) were identified from existing related literature to influence consumers’ website involvement. Unlike prior studies, the “Stimulus-OrganismResponse” model and an integrated framework combining the transactional view and the relational view of consumer-website interaction were used to test the relationship among website service quality, website involvement (cognitive involvement and affective involvement), and website stickiness. Empirical result shows that website service quality has no significant direct impact on website stickiness. However, it has significantly positive effects on both cognitive involvement and affective involvement, which in turn significantly correlate to website stickiness, indicating that website involvement plays full mediating role in the relation between website service quality and website stickiness. The results also indicate that consumer affective involvement strongly influences their cognitive involvement toward a shopping website.