The Relationship between Online Vendor Attributes and Online Customer Relationship Quality

This paper aims to examine the relationship between merchandise, website navigation, price perception and online relationship quality. The findings indicate that merchandise has a significant effect on relationship quality. Relationship value had an indirect effect on relationship strength and citizenship behavior through relationship quality. Introduction Many researchers and managers maintain that one of the key goals of marketing is to build and sustain strong customer relationships (Bagozzi, 1995; DeWulf, Odekerken-Schröder, & Iacobucci, 2001; McKenna, 1991). Relationship marketing is a contemporary marketing practice that enables a selling firm to gain greater insight into each individual customer's motivation for purchasing products (Gronroos, 1990). In order to successfully service online consumers, online vendors should know exactly what the consumers expect from them and how to build the customer relationships and improve the online relationship quality. The purpose of this study is to propose and test the relationship between online vendors attributes include merchandise, website navigation, price perception and online relationship quality. Merchandise Findings from empirical studies have provided evidence that merchandise was the most important attribute to enhancing both trust and satisfaction (Byoungho &Parkal., 2006). Perceptions of merchandise quality play a central role in a consumer's evaluative process (Dodds et al., 1991; Kerin et al., 1992; Zeithaml, 1988). Research has demonstrated that the effect of perceived quality on customer loyalty is direct (Cronin, Brady & Hult, 2000) as well as indirect through value (Cronin et al., 2000; Sirohi,McLaughlin & Wittink, 1998). Conceptually, merchandise quality is viewed very broadly as an attitude-like judgment of superiority or excellence (Zeithaml, 1988). In a study to identify perceived quality constructs of consumers’ durable goods, perceived merchandise quality played a crucial role affecting the purchase choices. Cronin, Brady and Hult (2000) also indicated the importance of merchandise quality on consumer decision making. But the importance of the merchandise quality influences on satisfaction and store loyalty are largely ignored (Parasuraman et al.,1994). As a consequence, this study considers merchandise quality as an antecedent and investigates its effect on online relationship quality. Website Navigation Good quality e-businesses provide current and future customers with pleasant online experiences. Researchers have studied the impact that web site navigation and graphics have on customer perceptions of the online shopping experience (Ariely, 2000; Hoffman & Novak, 1996; Hoque & Lohse, 1999; Lynch & Ariely, 2000; Schlosser & Kanfer, 1999). One can measure the success of an e-business by the number of online customer of visits, purchases, repeat business, and the 89 2018 4th Annual International Conference on Modern Education and Social Science (MESS 2018) Copyright © 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research (ASSEHR), volume 183