The Association Between COSE and OIBB
The criticality of customer experience to businesses, in both the offline and online retail contexts cannot be overemphasized (Gentile et al., 2007; Srivastava & Kaul, 2016). In the offline context, for instance, business owners have invested ever-greater financial resources in the development of customer experiences that encourage shoppers to spend ever-higher sums on a repeat basis over several years (Ameen et al., 2021; Godovykh & Tasci, 2020; Zhou et al., 2023). Business owners also tend to develop a positive brand image and depend on high levels of customer loyalty within the offline context (Anshu et al., 2022; Buhalis et al., 2023; Fernández-Sabiote & Román, 2012). In an online context, COSE is central in shaping and influencing customer experience. COSE is a complex entity comprising a range of utilitarian and hedonic features, such as ease of use, perceived usefulness, perceived enjoyment, cost benefits, personalization, social interaction, and convenience. Collectively, these factors combine with several others to stimulate key e-commerce outcomes, such as brand engagement, positive electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM), and repeat purchases (Bilgihan et al., 2016).
Over the years, various researchers have separated specific aspects of the COSE construct into utilitarian and emotional groupings (De Keyser et al., 2020; McLean et al., 2018; Tyrväinen et al., 2020). According to Klaus (2013), for instance, the utilitarian dimension consists of five independent aspects, and the emotional dimension consists of three. Pandey and Chawla (2018), on the other hand, categorized the utilitarian and emotional dimensions into six and four components, respectively. Thus, COSE can be seen as a multidimensional subjective process that is shaped by the interactions between shoppers and their online environment (Barari et al., 2020; Cachero-Martínez & Vázquez-Casielles, 2021; Izogo & Jayawardhena, 2018; Mohseni et al., 2018; Xu et al., 2022). In this study, we identified the commonalities across these two models and eliminated the overlap between their component parts with the objective to combine their strengths, while minimizing their weaknesses. After our examination, we arrived at something closely related to the model used by Gulfraz et al. (2022), whose three “psychological” dimensions are similar to our emotional ones, but less clearly oriented toward an affective focus.
The model of Gulfraz et al. (2022) also proposes attitudinal loyalty as a mediating variable between COSE and OIBB. This idea has attained some currency in recent literature, although its origins are obscure. We retain as a hypothesis of this current study that there is a connection between positive COSE and attitudinal loyalty that influences shopping behavior. This hypothesis is related to the work of scholars such as Gentile et al. (2007), who argue that shoppers form a psychological auto-response (either positive or negative) to e-commerce platforms, based on their interactional experience with these platforms, and this auto-response moderates their buying behavior. Other studies suggest that shoppers who form a positive response to a platform are more likely to make impulsive purchases, and even vice versa, but these studies employ a variety of unclearly related constructs and are often done in rather specific market contexts (Ju & Jang, 2023; Drossos et al., 2014; Zhang et al., 2022). There remain limited empirical studies that have specifically explored the association between COSE and OIBB, thus providing justification for this study.