The effects of e-commerce websites' product recommendation on purchasers' loyalty and decision-making process in Vietnamese young social shopping communities
Abstract
Online Product Recommendation (OPR) systems offered by E-commerce websites (Lazada.vn, Tiki.vn, Shopee.vn,..) are playing an important role by providing real-time product recommendations based on customers’ past behavior and references, contributing a huge impact in increasing purchasers’ satisfaction, boosting websites’ revenue through up-selling or cross-selling, and settling a long-term relationship between websites and customers. Despite the system’s impact, there has not been much research about how its characteristics influence customers’ decision making quality and subsequently affect on customers’ loyalty. This research model was developed to investigate how positive and negative characteristics of OPR’s quality influence purchasers’ decision-making process and their time spent while surfing E-commerce websites, and how these two factors conclusively affect customer loyalty. The results point out that customer loyalty is significantly influenced by decision making quality and is slightly negatively affected by customer time wasted. Decision-making quality is positively influenced by both content relevance and vividness, customer time wasted is positively influenced by information overload and deceptiveness. This research’s result can be utilized by E-commerce websites to optimize their Product Recommendation system to gain more customer loyalty and be a strong player in the market.