An Examination of the Determinants of Customer Loyalty in Online Group-buying Context in China

With the rapidly development of e-commerce, online shopping becomes very popular among Chinese customers. In the past few years, online group-buying has experienced big rise and fall, thus, how to retain customers and improve customer loyalty should be considered by the practitioners. This study aims to explore potential factors which contribute to customer loyalty in the online group-buying context. Based on the literature review, we proposed a research model included five factors which directly or indirectly affect customer loyalty of online group-buying. The model was empirically evaluated using survey data collected from 352 users, and the data was analyzed by the structural equation modeling technology. Six research hypotheses were proposed in the study. Four research hypotheses were positively significant supported, while two research hypotheses were rejected in this study. The result shows that both customer satisfaction and switching costs have positive effects on customer loyalty in the online group-buying context, and the effect from switching costs is stronger. Furthermore, structural assurances in the process of online group-buying have strong effect on customers’ trust, while customer satisfaction is directly affected by trust. In addition, both theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed at last.