This research makes a case for treating an electronic commerce web site as a social actor
and argues that LT-enabled support for personalization systems and virtual communities
has a significant impact on the perceived communication characteristics of a web site.
This research studied the impact of two communication characteristics - adaptiveness
and connectivity of a web site. Adaptiveness indicates the extent to which a web site
adapts itself to support the needs of its customers whereas connectivity refers to the
ability of a web site to link potential customers with other visitors. Further, synthesizing
research from communication, media choice and technology adoption literatures, this
thesis proposes social presence as the experiential construct and perceived usefulness as
the utilitarian construct that will mediate the relationship between communication
characteristics of a medium and customer loyalty.
A survey and a laboratory experiment were conducted to test the linkages proposed
above. The survey showed that while adaptiveness impacted on both social presence and
perceived usefulness, connectivity had an impact only on social presence and an
insignificant impact on perceived usefulness. Social presence did not influence perceived
usefulness while both social presence and perceived usefulness had a significant impact
on customer loyalty. By filtering Amazon.com real-time, the lab experiment was
conducted to specifically study the causal impact of a web site's support for
personalization and virtual communities.
Support for personalization had a strong impact on adaptiveness, whereas support for
consumer reviews had strong effect on connectivity. Interestingly, support for personalization had a weaker, but significant effect on connectivity and support for
consumer reviews had a similar effect on adaptiveness. Data from the experiment was
also analyzed using mediation analyses as well as partial least square analysis to show
that the general pattern of results observed were consistent across methods thus
improving the confidence in the research model proposed.
This research by proposing social presence as a crucial experiential predictor of customer
loyalty has addressed an important gap that exists in our current understanding of web
users' behavior. It also makes a key contribution by empirically showing that a web
site's support for IT-enabled personalization and virtual communities do have a
significant impact not only on the perceived communication characteristics, but also on
customer loyalty through social presence and perceived usefulness. / Business, Sauder School of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/15154 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Kumar, M. S. N. |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Format | 23876762 bytes, application/pdf |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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