CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Research Background
The emergence of the Internet has fundamentally changed people’s mindsets, views on the world and accordingly changed their lifestyles. Thanks to social media, smart-phones, tablets and tech-savvy customers (Charlie, 2013), online shopping has become a dominant trends and will become more popular with a deeper degree of adoption and penetration of internet technology (Rose, Hair and Clark, 2011). At present, more and more bricks-and-mortar stores have opened their online retailing websites to access to more customers from home and abroad, and provided better services; on the other hand, online-only shops like Amazon, Base Formula, compete against traditional retailing with the advantages of low operating cost (Pearson, 2012). At the end of the day, even though the role of online website in the market cannot completely take the place of traditional stores, there is no denying the fact that online purchasing will continue to grow with updated standards, more diversified offers, more competitive price and better quality of services (Pearson, 2012). Therefore, for companies, more attention should be shifted to online stores development for customer retention, brand recognition, loyalty and so on.
When it comes to online shop development, many companies nowadays agree that creating superior customer experience is an effective way to sustain competitive advantage (Shaw and Ivens, 2005) and will be an important part that companies try to focus on (Schmitt, 2011), because emotional links between companies and customers are difficult and costly for competitors to duplicate (Berry, Carbone and Haekel, 2002). Customer experience, as an internal and subjective impression on the direct and indirect contact with a company (Meyer and Schwader, 2007), should reflect the offering of a company (Zomerdijk and Voss, 2009). More importantly, customer experience on online websites has a significant impact on the long-term online store prosperity and reshaping of company strategies (Nambisan and Watt, 2010).
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1.2 Rationale of the Present Study
With the development of the Internet, online purchasing has become increasingly popular in contemporary society. Online shopping, however, is no longer a simple shopping behaviour based on the Internet since online consumers perception is developing as well. Accordingly, more and more consumers prefer online shopping as a means of relaxation and entertainment. As a result, online customer experience has aroused interest within the fields of electronic business operators and marketing researchers. Creating a unique customer experience on purchasing websites is of significant importance for customer retention of companies.
When reviewing the literature on this topic, it has been found out that the extant literature either focused on the
