Business Process & Strategy

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Anderson and Kerr (2002), identifies that success on e-commerce road is attributed to the personalization felt by the end user

It has been highlighted in previous researches that Trust is a key factors governing the consumer and e-commerce brand relationship. Brian J Corbitt, Theerasak Thanasankit and Han Yi (2003) identified numerous key factors related to the trust and proposed a framework based on a series of underpinning relationships among these factors.

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The above framework outlines the relationships which governs the perceived trust and finally culminates into participation in the e-commerce platforms. The findings in their research suggest that people are more likely to purchase from the web if they perceive a higher degree of trust in e-commerce and have more experience in using the web. Customer’s trust levels are likely to be influenced by the level of perceived market orientation, site quality, technical trustworthiness, and user’s web experience. People with a higher level of perceived site quality seem to have a higher level of perceived market orientation and trustworthiness towards e-commerce. Furthermore, people with a higher level of trust in e-commerce are more likely to participate in e-commerce. Positive ‘word of mouth’, money back warranty and partnerships with well-known business partners, rank as the top three effective risk reduction tactics. These findings complement the previous findings on e-commerce and shed light on how to establish a trust relationship on the World Wide Web.

Norizan M. Kassim and Nor Asiah Abdullah (2008) investigate the impact of individual customer perceived quality on customer satisfaction, trust, and loyalty in e-commerce companies. The research tries to establish a relation between role of customer satisfaction and trust in the customer purchase intention. The customers’ purchase intentions effects future profit of the firm and thus plays a critical role in managerial decision making.

A study by Dianne, Kindra and Dash (2008) attempted to explore the relationship between e-loyalty, website design, trust and satisfaction in an Indian context. Their study revealed significant preferences for the local website for almost all design categories. Further, the local site instilled greater trust, satisfaction, and loyalty. Data collected for this study were compared with parallel work conducted in four other countries using the same procedures.

Sheshadri Tirunillai and Gerard Tellis (2014) proposed a unified framework to extract the dimension of quality from user-generated content (UGC), obtained from online user reviews; Ascertain the valence, validity, importance, dynamics, and heterogeneity. Use these dimension for strategy analysis. The dimensions of quality are critical from consumer perspective and used by marketers and firms to evaluate brands. The model uses unsupervised latent Dirichlet allocation on a sample of UGC content.

Gaps in Research

Srini S Srinivasan, Rolph Anderson, Kishore Ponnavalu (2002) identify 8 factors affecting the e-loyalty, there are several variable unique to e-commerce purchase which has not been evaluated in the study. The research as such in a specific manner does not address roles of Brands in e-commerce. There is also no consensus, in various studies performed, on the theoretical models employed to describe and predict brand behavior to showcase the customer behavior. This lack of a common theoretical framework suggests the need to develop an integrative model of the phenomenon in order to promote systematic investigation of its components and the online shopping process.

The survey of related studies has revealed that there is very limited research in indentifying role of brands in the context of e-commerce purchase decisions. Since customer relationships are built over time, research cannot fully capture the dynamic, interactive and linear nature of so many relationship variables. Moreover, research could be enhanced by expanding the current model. The role of cultural issues could be investigated to add further depth.

The existing gap in research justifies the rationale of the study at hand. The present study has been conducted so as to reduce the existing gap in research in this important area.

Qualitative Research

Focussed Group Discussion

To understand the loyalty of consumers when it comes to choosing an e-commerce platform, we conducted a focused group discussion. 10 participants were selected for this discussion, these participants use e-commerce platforms very frequently to avail various products and service ranging from travel tickets to house hold products.

The discussion lasted for 20 minutes. The discussion was moderated and the view points of the participants were recorded and analysed. The discussion revealed the following findings about e-commerce loyalty.​

​We discovered that ​consumers mainly purchase online​ ​because of convenience, ease of payment, door step delivery & price.​ However, price is not the only criterion when it comes to selecting an e-commerce platform. Other aspects such as service quality, brand ​r​eputation, variety of choice and good customer services strongly influence the choice of e-commerce platforms.

The conclusions from the focussed GD strongly support our findings of the quantitative research..

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Quantitative Research

Research Methodology

This research was performed in three stages. In the first stage, a questionnaire was designed and floated to understand the factors affecting purchase intention of customers, to measure brand perception of an e-commerce website in purchase decision of a customer, and to assess the sentimental and behavioural dimensions of customers towards the online e-commerce purchases.

In stage two of the research, administration of the questionnaire for data collection was performed. Finally, in the third stage, various research techniques were performed on the obtained data to establish a relation between brand of an e-commerce company and purchase decision of customers.

Stage

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