Time effect of disconfirmation on online shopping

ABSTRACT

To succeed in the rapidly growing and highly competitive e-commerce environment, it is important to understand the relationship between the cognition and continued usage behaviour of online shopping customers as they relate to enhancing customer conversion and retention. A longitudinal perspective is adopted in this study and expectation disconfirmation theory is applied to examine how disconfirmation influences the relationship between customer expectations and repurchase intentions when considering the effect of time. This work aims at (1) identifying the relationships between the pre-purchase expectations and post-purchase attitudes of online consumers; (2) elucidating how previous purchase experience influences subsequent purchase intention; and (3) examining the moderating role of disconfirmation in an online shopping context. The results provide useful implications for the management of customer expectations and future purchase behaviour in customers with different levels of disconfirmation.

KEYWORDS:

• Expectation disconfirmation theory
• satisfaction
• longitudinal study
• online repurchase intention
• online shopping

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Professor James J. Jiang for his valuable comments on the data collection process. We also would like to thank the Editor-in-Chief, the Associate Editor, and the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful and constructive comments that have greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.