Ssessing the Influence of Online Customer Experience on Repurchase Intention: The Mediating Role of Shopping Attitude

Abstract

The success of every online retailer depends on delivering a distinctive online customer experience which serves as a pivotal determiner in building a viable competitive edge in a market filled with opportunities. Thus, on the tenets of the Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) and the Belief Attitude-Intention (B-A-I) theory this study aims to assess the influence of online customer experience on Ghanaian customers’ intention to repurchase, considering the mediating role of shopping attitude. Two objectives and eleven hypotheses were formulated by reviewing the literature on online customer experience, shopping attitude, and repurchase intention. The study sought to assess the influence of online customer experience dimensions on Ghana customers’ intention to repurchase. Also, the study assessed the mediating effect of consumers’ attitudes towards shopping on the relationship between a pragmatic experience, visual experience, intellectual experience, social experience, emotional experience, and repurchase intention among Ghanaian customers. The study adopted a purposive and a snowball sampling method to gather data from four hundred and thirty-five online shoppers in the southern part of Ghana. Descriptive and structural equation modelling analytical methods were employed to evaluate the research objectives. However, the results revealed that pragmatic experience, intellectual experience, visual experience, and social experience had an insignificant effect on Ghanaian customers’ intentions to repurchase. Nonetheless, emotional experience significantly and positively influenced Ghanaian customers’ intentions to repurchase. Also, the study outcome revealed that shopping attitude partially mediates the relationship between emotional experience and repurchase intention among Ghanaian customers. More importantly, consumers' shopping attitudes failed to mediate the relationship between pragmatic experience, visual experience, intellectual experience, social experience, and online repurchase intention. In addition, the findings show that shopping attitude had a favorable and significant effect on Ghanaian customers’ intentions to repurchase. The study, therefore, recommends that to enhance the experience of online shoppers in Ghana, online retailers should improve the functionality of their websites by making the online retail platforms attractive, simplifying the buying procedures, employing assisted selling tools (e.g., dynamic imaging, store locators, body measurement tools, Chatbots, and tracking systems), enhancing the ease to navigate, improve the convenience of shopping online, and engaging customers via social networking platforms.