Determinants of Customer Loyalty in a Cloud Computing Environment

Introduction

In the increasingly intense and widespread e-commerce world (Brusch et al., 2019; StatInvestor, 2021), the business environment shows comparatively low entry barriers (Wang et al., 2016) enabling even micro companies to participate. However, the major shift to an increased usage of e-Commerce provides challenges not only for managers but also for customers. From the customer perspective, they benefit from the online very low switching costs moving from one vendor website to another ((Reddy & Reddy, 2018; Mofokeng, 2021; Mutum et al., 2014). In such business environment, a major challenge for vendors online is creating and maintaining customer satisfaction with their websites (Phan et al., 2021; Mohammed et al., 2021). Many studies have shown for success in e-commerce a company must deliver superior service to its customers as the primary way to grow customer loyalty (Taher, 2021; Sharma & Lijuan, 2015; Mofokeng, 2021; Tsao et al., 2016). Cloud Computing (CC) in general because of its low up-front development costs and pay-as-you-go nature provides a unique opportunity for companies of all sizes to readily participate in e-commerce worldwide (Alam 2020; Pilevari et al., 2011).

The PaaS CC environment is special because providers can produce a greater variety of website features compared to the more widely studied SaaS environment. The greater web development flexibility is likely to be important as web site design and operational features become available. Thus, the PaaS environment is also more likely to show significant results for the study objectives. Due to the lack of studies on customer loyalty in a PaaS environment, this study was conducted with two main objectives. The first was to assess the relationships between customer loyalty and three of its potential determinants (customer satisfaction with the website, after sale customer service, and product return handling). 2. Test the impact of the website’s Customer Decision Support System as a potential moderator for the relationship between customer satisfaction with the website and customer loyalty. This is increasingly important as customers have to acquire and process increasingly larger amounts and variety of information available in the e-commerce environments during product search and evaluation process.

To accomplish the two main objectives mentioned above, partly based on the literature in the areas of Marketing and Social Psychology, this study empirically tests a specific theoretical model examining three likely determinants for eCommerce customer loyalty previously studied in the marketing literature. Testing this model in the context of PAAS Cloud Computing (CC) can potentially corroborate its validity from a different perspective and extend the model with the inclusion of new constructs.