Explaining Online Customer Repurchase Intentions from a Relationship-Marketing Perspective

Abstract

Due to the low cost of searching for alternatives online, it is difficult to increase customer repurchase intention in the business-to-customer context. Relationship marketing (RM) is seen as an important way to foster customer trust, and in turn encourage repurchase intentions, which is consistent with the RM tactics-relational mediator-outcome paradigm in the offline context. Several studies have noted that the 4Rs marketing strategy both reflects and implements the concept of RM. This study thus examines whether RM-related constructs based on the 4Rs marketing strategy (i.e., assurance, customer satisfaction, perceived usefulness, corporate image, and perceived value) positively affect online customer repurchase intention; it also adopts trust as a relational mediator to investigate whether trust mediates the effect of the 4Rs marketing strategy on repurchase intention. The results of an online survey indicated that satisfaction, perceived usefulness, corporate image, perceived value, and trust were antecedents of repurchase intention. Additionally, this study statistically confirms that trust is a critical mediator of the indirect effects of RM-related constructs on repurchase intention. The theoretical and practical implications of this work are also discussed.