| dc.description.abstract | As the acceptance of Internet grows, the online B2C electronic commerce market in Taiwan shows great business opportunities. The online market can be considered as a near perfect market due to its visibility and low transaction costs. In addition, many websites of online stores nowadays have design quality of the same caliber. As a result, customer loyalty to a specific online store diminishes. As a result, developing a long-term relationship with their customers becomes an ever important issue for online retailers to obtain competitive advantage.
The application of the concept of relationship marketing on the Internet has been getting more and more attention in practice, but related empirical research is relatively scarce. In response, the study attempts to investigate the effects of various aspects of relational bonds on customer loyalty across search- and experience-goods on the Internet.
Based on previous research, books and travel packages were chosen to represent search goods and experience goods respectively in this study. Online questionnaire was employed to collect data, and structured equation model was used to analyze the collected data.
Results suggest that the higher information asymmetry the goods is, the higher level of relational bonds the online retailer needs to maintain with their customers. Furthermore, financial bonds have no positive impact on customer loyalty for both search and experience goods. For search goods, social and structural bonds are both important. However, for experience goods, structural bonds are more important. | en_US |