Consumer Behaviour

What are the most important factors that influence customer satisfaction when buying online?
With the widespread use of the Internet, online shopping is becoming a worldwide business. The study from UCLA Centre for Communication Policy (2001) states that shopping online is third most popular Internet action that people will do after instant message and webpages browsing. Shopping online includes browsing the product items and purchasing procedure. Only if customers are offered with a satisfying experience, they will repurchase the product (Syed & Norjaya, 2010). Therefore, companies should not only focus on attracting new consumers, but also maintaining regular consumers by enhancing their satisfaction degree (Anderson & Srinivasan, 2003). Undoubtedly, customer satisfaction is impacted by numerous factors. Some of the factors are crucial while others are unimportant. Different from traditional shopping, online shopping has many new elements that are closely connected with Internet technology. As a consequence, factors that impact customer satisfaction are quite distinct. It is obvious that the study of these factors is quite essential in order to help companies keep their customers. This essay will demonstrate that technology characteristics including security and website design are the most important factors when compared with shopping characteristics and product characteristics that impact customer satisfaction when they do online shopping. These three categories will be explored including security, website design, payment method, delivery service, post-purchase service, product variety and product price.
First of all, security issue is the factor that could influence customer satisfaction most since customer would hesitate to buy product if there are some security flaws. Customer satisfaction is mostly impacted by security problems because customers concern that their privacy might be revealed through frequent electronic transfers (Lau, 2011)....