Role of EWOM, Product Satisfaction, and Website Quality on Customer Repurchase Intention

Introduction

The rapid development of web across the world has led to a significant impact on online markets. This has stimulated the retailers to pick electronic commerce as an instrument to interact with their customers. In the same way, online customers are also attracted towards adoption of internet shopping with intense feelings to depend on this medium for purchasing products. To influence online customers and enhancing their reach, online retailers aim to design an attractive website layout and create positive attitude towards product offering on the basis of customers' needs. With the amplification of e-shopping, the expectations of customers have risen manifold. In this electronic world, not only website quality, but also product quality and previous buyers' comment have emerged as crucial dimensions which are positively related with purchasing and repurchasing behaviour over the website. Previous researchers highlighted that higher website quality (Shin, Chung, Oh, & Lee, 2013), product satisfaction (Swan & Combs, 1976), and online user generated content (Singh et al., 2017) can maximize profit for online retailers in online shopping. Thus, they have emerged as vital areas for online retailers to improve through which they can boost the confidence among online customers as well as push them to repurchase.

In the web world, many people are connected through social media and it is a part of their daily life. The social platform has drastically changed the customers' online buying habits. It has actually transformed the online customers as well as retailers' dynamics in e-shopping. And the presence of social media and e-commerce has given many purchasing options to contemporary buyers. It is very hard for customers to choose the right product with the small description available on the website through online retailers. In that case, they want to know previous buyers experience about the product. At that time, electronic word of mouth (EWOM) play crucial role to help customers in their final buying decision. This research studies the role of EWOM in customers' overall satisfaction as well as repurchases intention (RI). Many previous study highlighted the positive impact of EWOM on satisfaction (Utz, Kerkhof, & Van Den Bos, 2012; You, Xia, Liu, & Liu, 2012) and RI (Chiu, Hsieh, & Kao, 2005; Shin et al., 2013).

In the highly competitive online market, the marketer tries to distinguish itself by offering quality range of products with offers and discounts. Previous Marketing literature claims that product satisfaction is powerful enough to moderate customer buying intention (Giese & Cote, 2000; Keeney, 1999; Swan & Combs, 1976; Westbrook, 1980). The customers are attracted by the plethora of product promotion (Akingbade, 2014), product quality (Holloway & Beatty, 2003), and product availability (Roy Dholakia & Zhao, 2010) schemes.

In the light of above discussion, the e-commerce customer satisfaction and repurchase intention are assumed to be influenced by three dimensions, namely, website quality (WEQ), product satisfaction (PS), and EWOM. These three dimensions have not been studied by any other researchers into one research model. Therefore, to fill this research gap, this chapter understands the significant factors of WEQ, product satisfaction (PS), and EWOM that lead to customer satisfaction and repurchase.

The layout of the chapter is as follows. The concepts and hypothesis development with respect to WEQ, product satisfaction, and EWOM will be reviewed in the next section. Following that, the methodology structure will be explained. After that, the summary for data analysis and results will be discussed. Then, the managerial implications and conclusions of the chapter will be presented. Finally, last section summaries the limitations and directions for the further research.