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Top1. Introduction
With the advancement in the technology, the competition in businesses is also increasing and in this essence, the emergence of e-retailing is prominent (Rose et al., 2012; Srikanth and Dhanapal, 2011). E-retailing can be deemed as a phenomenon which incorporates sales through online or electronic channels of the products and services (Dixit, 2016; Sarkar and Das, 2016). Therefore, with technological integration, the businesses are found to be keen to incorporate effective management strategies that can result in better customer experience (CE) (Hicks, 2018). The concept pertaining to customer experience deriving from online channels is now regarded as online customer experience (OCE) as stated by the research of (Salehi et al., 2013; Bleier et al., 2019). It has been due to the fact that better customer experience with the brand can lead to higher performance. Rose et al. (2011) in this essence stated that OCE is one of the significant factors that is affecting the aggregate performance of the organisations. Hence, this research is aimed to test a model empirically for assessing the association between outcomes and antecedents of OCE in e-retailing shopping website and the impact of those antecedents on CE in the case of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). There are limited researches that have underpinned KSA’s case, for instance; the research of Palací et al. (2019) considered the subject of customer satisfaction’s (CS) antecedents and fragmented them into effective and cognitive tradition. Besides, the research of Rose et al. (2012) analysed OCE’s antecedents’ effect on OCE while considering the dimension of repurchase intention in the case of Malaysia. However, the researches in the same context on KSA are limited, therefore, the following research has addressed this gap due to increase in KSA’s online shopping appetite of shoppers. According to a survey conducted by Mastercard (2014), there was a rise in online shopping in KSA and as per statistics at least every person e-shopped in a year. Therefore, this study has been focused on finding the antecedents of e-retail market and creating an empirical model to show the relationship of these antecedents with OCE as well as the impact of the former on the latter considering KSA which will be beneficial for the upcoming e-retailers to devise their strategies and the existing one to mend them. The main objectives of the research paper are stated as follows:
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To study the concept and idea of online customer engagement;
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To identify the components of online customer engagement;
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To assess the relationship between the factors of OCE associated with e-retailing based on antecedents and outcomes variables in the case of KSA.