e-loyalty: more of the same or something different

Abstract

This paper explores the factors involved in the structural design of loyalty programmes within the online domain from the buyers perspective. A conceptual framework was developed to capture the important factors and measure their impact together with their respective interrelationships. The framework brings together the insights of the theoretical approaches to customer loyalty as an interaction of attitude and behaviour from a conceptualised theoretical model of e-loyalty as suggested by Gommans, Krishnan and Scheffold (2001) and combining incentive factors from Jupiter (2000) to assess priority in software development.

The research aims to provide an empirical characterisation of online consumer behaviour in a loyalty programme context by examining online consumers from four online businesses in Australia, representing four sectors – grocery, gift, adult and book.