The virtual nature of e-commerce creates both opportunities and risks for online sellers and buyers. Online sellers welcome the opportunity to expand their markets worldwide but face fierce competition. Establishing long-term customer relationships based on trust and loyalty has proved to be a successful business strategy. In attempts to attract and retain global customers, e-vendors signal their trustworthiness through web design eleme"n, ts. These signals are directed to the customers, regardless of the country in which they live. The ability to shop across traditional physical borders, and purchase foreign products from the convenience of home, appeals to a growing number of consumers; however, online buyers are cautious about which online stores they can trust. Online consumers enter online exchanges when they develop initial trust based on their perceptions of e-vendors' signals or cues of the company's ability, benevolence, and integrity. The majority of existing cross-cultural studies of online trust and online trust cues use quantitative research methods. Their findings on the impact of consumers' cultural background on developing online trust appear to be inconsistent as some studies find no impact of culture on developing online trust, while others provide evidence of the opposite. There is still another group of researchers who propose the existence of a common virtual culture that is adhered to by customers around the world regardless of their cultural background. This presents an opportunity for a study with a qualitative approach that would explore the cultural influence on customers' perceptions of online trust cues and help to better understand what makes customers trust one web site and not another. This research focuses on the first phase of developing online trust - identification and interpretation of online trust cues as recognized by shoppers from three different countries (Germany, Russia, and the United States). A repertory grid research technique was implemented and, as a result, fourteen categories of online trust cues were identified and compared across three cultures. This study provides a three-fold contribution as the results of this work add to methodology and epistemology as well as have practical implications: (1) This study is, to date, the only research that utilizes the repertory grid method for collecting data online and analyzing consumers' perceptions of online trust cues (2) This study contributes to the academic literature on online trust signals as it provides insight into the types of cues that are identified by customers from three different cultures (3) This study provides practical recommendations for e-vendors on what trust signals could be incorporated into the design of commercial web sites to appeal to global customers.

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As technologies become more complex and permeate society’s day-to-day cultural interactions, the need grows for practical metrics to assess how the usability of distribution channels, in for example the financial services sector, shapes the customer’s perception of the brands that they deal with. These perceptions can be formed via direct user interaction between the customer and the user interface, or via user interaction with support systems, such as the contact centre, that are in place for staff to communicate with customers. The research presented here presents a justification for turning transactions into relationships, with specific reference to the financial services sector, by proposing practical metrics for usability and the dyadic customer-brand relationship based on empirical investigation. This thesis seeks to bridge the gap between relevant yet disparate disciplines of psychology, marketing and usability engineering. The intention is to investigate how customer perceptions of the brand of a financial services enterprise can be measured and interpreted. The thesis presents, for the first time how the customer-brand relationship can be affected by channel usability and the customer’s perception of the brand based on their interactions with different distribution channels or person-to-person interactions. The contribution to knowledge in this thesis is represented by the formulation of a reliable and valid metric for brand personality assessment. The experiment results included here show how the metric has been successfully designed and implemented with specific relevance to the financial services sector.

Abstract Internet shopping is growing in the UK and worldwide. The Internet has been identified as a significant growth area for retailers. Retailers need to understand the motivations of Internet shopping in order to fully address their shoppers' needs. This research investigates the motivations and determinants of Internet shopping. There is a paucity of international research on the consumer determinants of Internet shopping. This research provides valuable international data in an under researched area. The literature review identified three motivations of significance, these included: price, convenience, and hedonic motivations. These three factors were examined in order to determine the relative importance of each factor to the respondents. The research consists of an Internet survey conducted between 1999-2002 with UK, US and Hong Kong respondents, which gathers quantitative and qualitative data related to the determinants and motivations of Internet shoppers. The results provide an analysis of the determinants of Internet shopping with an international perspective. This includes a conceptualisation of internet shopping motivations, as well as an examination of the differences in relative importance of the major factors. The research strongly indicates that price on its own is a relatively unimportant factor for most consumers in this study in comparison with convenience. However, this traditional 'convenience' view is belied by the finding that price information! time saving is a major motivator for Internet shoppers. The research indicates that hedonic motivations of internet shopping were largely absent from respondents' Internet shopping experiences during the period of data collection. The research concludes that Internet shopping motivations are a mixture of the utilitarian and the hedonic, accessing information about prices leads to satisfaction and perhaps enjoyment. The research also concluded that 'control of information' is a highly significant motivator for Internet Shoppers. Finally, the research proposes briefly that retailers must become 'information retailers' if they wish to expand Internet sales

It is widely assumed that the success of a computer system is related to its usability, yet there is little data to support this supposition. The concept of usability as it may apply to system success is reviewed. A modern, broad definition of interface usability is proposed comprising utility, attitude and performance factors in relation to specific users, tasks and environments. Appropriate usability metrics are devised to compare interface designs in controlled experiments. The experiments are conducted in the context of Banking and the Internet. A clear and consistent relationship between attitudes toward usability and preference quality ratings for interfaces is demonstrated and extends to usage intentions in the eBanking context. Further, the relationship between preferences, attitudes and performance measures are explored and findings support previous research: that preference does not always follow performance, and that attitudes and performance (subjective and objective measures of usability) are not always directly related. Levels of utility in the Banking interface are also explored. Finally, interface characteristics highly associated with preferences and usage intentions for Internet Banking services are highlighted.

The current study conceptualized the categories of consumer referents, concerning how they form their consumption preferences by elaborating reference points, in order to be better informed on items for a measurement scale. In addition the current study conceptualized the categories of shopping orientations (or decision-making styles) of Greek college students, as they better represent how consumers behave, act and make decisions. In the initial purification stage (i.e. pilot test, n=330), principal component analysis, with a varimax and oblique rotation was developed. In the fmal purification stage with a new data set (i.e. primary survey, n=556), confirmatory factor analysis was performed to examine the factors that define the two measurement models. Furthermore the methodology of Pearson's correlation helped in checking the potential relationships between those two scales. The results of the conceptualization of consumer referents produced a model made up of seven dimensions. These are: Explicit referents (Brand, Price and Store), and Implicit referents (PersonaL Financial, Social and Cultural). Furthermore the conceptualization of the decision-making styles inventory helped in analysing the utilization of consumers' referents. The results contributed to the identification of Greek college students' decision-making styles. The final model of the CSI produced six highly correlated dimensions: 1. Perfectionist, high quality conscious, 2. Recreational conscious, 3. Brand conscious, 4. Novelty conscious, 5. Impulsive conscious, and 6. Confused by over-choice. The technique of Pearson's correlation helped in analysing the effects of the six decision-making traits on the selected categorization of reference points (i.e. the seven categories of referents). The main findings suggest that consumers use reference points based on their distinct shopping orientations. As a whole the findings from this research offer new insights to marketing managers and research practitioners in analysing consumers' apparel consumption decision-making patterns. A summary, discussion of the results and recommendations for further research are proposed.

Few, if any, organisations can deliver 'zero defects' service to customers. The management of both complaints about service failure and the recovery strategies employed when critical incidents occur is therefore important because of its actual impact on consumer satisfaction and subsequent behaviour. The effectiveness of service failure management is dependent on a clear understanding of consumer reactions to service failure, recovery strategies, and the interrelationship between them with respect to the salience of service attributes and the concepts of 'blame attribution' and 'perceived justice'. The thesis focuses on service failure and recovery strategies within the UK hotel sector. It reviews the pertinent literature and reports the findings from two e-based questionnaires which examined service quality, service failure and recovery from the consumers' perspective. It is different from previous empirical work in this subject area because in contrast to both the large majority of published research on service quality and all previous empirical work on service failure and recovery, the conceptual framework is not based on the traditional expectancy-(dis)confirmation paradigm (where consumers evaluate a service by comparing pre-consumption expectations with actual performance). Instead, the research problem has been contextualised using service quality importance and performance constructs as predictors of consumer satisfaction and loyalty. The study also uses real critical incidents rather than the simulated service failure scenarios used by previous researchers. The analysis of service failure and recovery is therefore embedded in the context of the consumers' perceived importance of service attributes. It was hypothesised that the perceived importance of service attributes that fail ceteris paribus would significantly influence consumer reaction to the failure, the perceived effectiveness of recovery strategies and, in turn, the outcome of critical incidents with respect to overall satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, whilst the 'performance-only' approach is now generally regarded as the most effective model in terms of its superior predictive validity over 'importance-performance' models (performance weighted by importance) in studies of consumer satisfaction with service providers, in the particular context of service failure and recovery, it was hypothesised and subsequently confirmed that the 'performance weighted by importance' model has greater predictive validity. The results are compared with those found in previous research and the contribution of the thesis to the academic literature are discussed. The implications of the findings for service managers are also evaluated.

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