Exploring the Impact of Switching Barriers on e-Loyalty

Past studies in e-commerce loyalty were mostly focused on the effects of customer satisfaction and trust on loyalty toward online vendors. Few studies investigated the impacts of switching barriers, whilst they are widely proven to affect customer loyalty in offline commerce. Even in a handful of studies that did deal with switching barriers, their treatment of the subject remained at best superficial. This may have to do with the fact that switching costs in e-commerce could be comparatively negligible, as switching to another online vendor often involves one simple mouse click. In this study, we investigated the impact of switching barriers on loyalty under the e-commerce context. Furthermore, the extent of switching barriers which could be affected by those positive factors (most constructs were adopted from IDT) was also examined. The statistical testing results revealed that combined model which includes both the positive factors and the switching barriers explains the loyalty formation process more strongly ($R^2$ = 0.543) than each separated models ($R^2$ = 0.468 for positive factor only model, and $R^2$ = 0.365 for switching barrier only model). While only the two switching barriers such as convenience and emotional were shown to be statistically significant, we found that trust strongly influences customer's emotional barrier, let alone direct impact on loyalty, which thereby influences loyalty. The results offer insights for better understanding switching barriers in e-commerce related applications.