Mechanisms of building customer loyalty: Mediation of customer satisfaction with online retailing in South Africa

With the global expansion of electronic commerce, today’s retailers make concerted efforts to improve their websites’ ease of use, information quality, privacy, and security as mechanisms to build customer loyalty. However, understanding of how these mechanisms could be mediated by satisfaction and moderated by gender, age, monthly spending, and relationship duration in building customer loyalty towards e-retailers is scant, which is a gap this study investigates. This quantitative study targeted a judgmental sample of 700 online shoppers in South Africa. At least 601 usable responses were returned from an online survey, to test the theoretical framework using structural equation modeling on Amos 29. The findings showed that the significant positive effects of perceived security and privacy on customer loyalty are partially mediated by satisfaction, and moderated by gender, age, monthly spending, and relationship duration. The study unveiled the unified explanatory power of TAM, D&M IS success model, and the ECT, thus offering novel contributions. Practical strategies empowering e-retail managers to redirect efforts to improve satisfaction, which strengthens the effects of perceived security and privacy on loyalty of older and new male customers with high monthly spending are explained in context of South Africa, a developing country.