Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Trust in the Context of a Business Ecosystem on Customer Retention in Online Retailers.

Abstract: Customer retention also referred to as Customer loyalty has been proven to be an important factor in the success of online retailers. However, recent research has shown that many online retailers are still unenlightened on the elements they need to focus on in order to retain their customers. On the contrary, Amazon which operates in a business ecosystem has been found to have high customer loyalty which means that the company must have been able to modify rightly the appropriate contributors to online customer loyalty compared to the many other online retailers. Studies have been conducted to investigate different variables including customer satisfaction and trust to find out if these variables can be applied to improve online customer loyalty. Still, there has been no research that has investigated how customer satisfaction together with trust in the context of a business ecosystem may influence customer loyalty. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to investigate how online retailers create customer loyalty as a result of online customer satisfaction and trust in the context of the business ecosystem, by applying the case study of Amazon. The most suitable way of conducting this research was to collect quantitative data from Amazon customers who had shopped more than twice within the last two months from the time of participating in the self-completed survey. The questionnaire was distributed in different Facebook groups and was also shared with a number of participants via email. In order to answer the research questions and fulfill the study purpose, the data was analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences, and correlation and regression analyses were conducted. The findings indicated that customer satisfaction and trust in the context of a business ecosystem are the key factors in establishing customer loyalty. In addition, trust in the context of a business ecosystem contributed more to predicting customer loyalty in comparison to customer satisfaction.