South African generation-X online shopper satisfaction and their repurchase intentions

Abstract

The growth of online shopping channels gradually forces brick and mortar retailers to explore the importance of online shopping trends and online customer behavior. While maintaining customer satisfaction has been recognized as one of the essential factors for business survival and growth, this has not been sufficiently explored for online shopping platforms. Understanding what online constructs appeal to generation-X consumers is critical for organization that would want to pursue virtual business platforms. From a brief literature review in this study, it could be said that online customer satisfaction and its influences on online repurchase intentions in the South African retailing environment remain sparsely researched. Therefore, this study seeks to analyze the dimensions of online customer satisfaction and regress the online satisfaction dimensions on repurchase intentions of generation-X consumers. An attempt is made to apply the theory of planned behavior and social exchange in the adapted conceptual of the study. These theories are deemed to provide an appropriate theoretical grounding to this study. The target population was South African generation-X online consumers in Gauteng. A total of 377 questionnaires were received for data analysis. Implications of the research findings are discussed and limitations and future research directions are provided. Keywords: online shoppers, online customer satisfaction, repurchase intentions, generation-X consumers, South Africa. JEL Classification: M1, M30, M31, L10