Abstract
The dominant position of e-commerce is especially being articulated in the retailing industry once again due to several constraints that the world faces in the COVID-19 pandemic era. In this regard, this study explores the significant role of trust transfer (from offline to online) and the moderating effect of consumers’ neurotic traits in the framework of trust-satisfaction-repurchase intention in the e-commerce context based on a survey with 406 Korean e-commerce consumers. Moreover, a prediction-oriented segmentation (POS) technique combined with structural equation models (SEM) was utilized to reveal consumers’ probable hidden heterogeneous characteristics. The outcomes of the global model SEM analysis indicate that offline-online trust transference occurs in e-commerce, and the conveyed trust significantly influences satisfaction and consumers’ repeat purchase intention through satisfaction. Neuroticism also has significant positive effects on trust transfer in the global model. However, results in three subgroups generated by POS show heterogeneous characteristics that considerably differed from the global model test results. The implications from this study will be beneficial to field practitioners in the e-commerce industry in addressing the importance of trust transfer, negative neurotic traits as well as heterogeneous aspects of consumers.
Highlights
The importance of e-commerce has been articulated for decades, along with the dramatic evolution of the internet
The proposed hypotheses were examined in terms of trust transfer and the consumer loyalty framework (H1 to H4) and neuroticism’s moderating effect (H5) based on the measurement model’s reliability and validity
In the trust transfer context, H1 test found that online trust is statistically positively influenced by offline trust (β = 0.35, p < 0.001)
Summary
The importance of e-commerce has been articulated for decades, along with the dramatic evolution of the internet. Most brick and mortars have been tried to transit their primary business channel into the network environment, and many of them successfully settled in the new ecosystem by conducting a multichannel strategy (i.e., Bestbuy and Walmart). Trust-Transfer, Neuroticism and Repurchase Intention for these retailers would be whether consumers’ trust from online shopping experiences remain the same as they originally perceived from offline shopping experiences or not It is crucial for vendors in e-commerce to sufficiently recognize and focus on trust transfer from offline to online, especially if they have a multichannel business (Lee et al, 2007; Ke et al, 2016). Consumers have a tendency to build online trust during the experience of frequent purchasing in e-commerce (Bock et al, 2012)
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