Loyalty in e-commerce : Less is actually more

Abstract: Internet has brought new opportunities for companies to do business with each other. The company should focus on increasing loyalty to achieve customer retention and long-term relationships. Today, customer loyalty is critical for the company to survive on the competitive market, especially in the context of e-commerce. A loyal customer have higher propensity to stay in the relationship, resulting in long-term benefits for both parties such as reduced transaction costs as well as an enhanced competitiveness. Therefore, the purpose of this thesis is to explore the factors that drive customer loyalty in a business-to-business context, in order to facilitate the number of sales on e-commerce platform. To fulfill the purpose of this thesis, the study has sent out a survey to a number of business customers. The investigation shows that a several factors drive a customer to become loyal in a business-to-business context. First, recommendations from others as well as guarantees from third parties are factors driving the customer to become interested in the company to begin with. One key concept that is recurrent in this study is simplicity, both on the e-commerce platform but also outside the platform. Another major driver to become loyalty are the factor about the company keeping the promise given to their customer.