Building Customer Loyalty in Online Business Models

Abstract

Online business models are developing rapidly and market competition is intensifying. Customer loyalty and consumer willingness are declining across many industries. Customer loyalty is a decisive factor affecting a company's long-term profits. Market share measured by customer loyalty is more meaningful than market share measured by the number of customers. At the same time, corporate managers have shifted the focus of marketing management to improving customer loyalty, allowing companies to gain advantages in fierce competition. To build customer loyalty, it is important to use the right customer loyalty tools, which means the significant question for companies is which tool to choose. Therefore, this paper aimed to address the issues that how to design customer loyalty in online business models. To achieve this goal, this paper first illustrated the basics of customer loyalty and online business models. Then, relevant customer loyalty tools were selected and evaluated from contracts, products, communication and distribution policies to better build customer loyalty in online business models. This paper found that customer analysis and competitive analysis can also be evaluated as customer loyalty-oriented theories. Finally, the case of Amazon was also studied in the paper specifically, combining theory with practice to build customer loyalty in an online business model.