Customer Retention and Unplanned Purchases on the Web

Abstract

The explosion of business to consumer electronic commerce creates new challenges for companies to design electronic systems and interactions that retain customers and increase sales. This exploratory study examines the impacts of select system design and other variables that can influence customer intention to return and the number of unplanned purchases made in an online store. We find that both the level of perceived control and the shopping enjoyment experienced by new web customers can increase their intention to return. However, repeat customers do not seem to be influenced by either perceived control or shopping enjoyment in terms of their intention to return. We also find that an engaging web store design that utilizes value-added search mechanisms and presents a positively challenging experience can increase the customers' perceived control and enjoyment. Our results also indicate that product involvement is less important to new customers as opposed to repeat customers but the more often customers return to a web store the more their shopping enjoyment is determined by their product involvement. Finally, our study shows that neither perceived control nor shopping enjoyment have any significant impact on the number of unplanned purchases made by customers. Our results deepen our understanding of the consumer online shopping experience and suggests the need for the design of systems which increase the user's perceived control to encourage repeat use of online stores