A competitor is usually just one click away, so how to companies make their websites stickier and so retain their potential buyers and persuade them to make a purchase? Writing in the International Journal of Technology Marketing, a team from India has investigated the role of customer values, satisfaction, trust, and habits and how those characteristics related to their sticking with a given website.
Terjani Goyal of the Institute of Rural Management in Jaipur and Kirti Dutta of Rishihood University in Haryana, found that trust is the biggest mediator of a website’s stickiness. First and foremost, if a putative customer does not trust the company nor the website on which they land, then they are not likely to stay for long and will surf off to a rival post haste. The team suggests that by managing the factors that determine customer trust as best they can, a company can enhance satisfaction and help form new habits with visitors that leads to them buying from the website rather than their sticking with a competitor.
Online shopping has become a major part of commerce and was essential for many people during the periods of COVID-19 lockdowns and self-isolation. The team writes that there is a concept of website stickiness that is partly driven by a user’s fear of venturing on to a new site to buy the goods and services they have purchased from trusted sources previously. The paradigm for garnering new business is for a previously unused site to somehow make its site sticky to new users who land on it from a search engine, word-of-mouth recommendation or marketing and advertising campaigns. Once a new habit is thus formed, customers will stick with that website for subsequent purchases.
Indeed, the new research shows that “online retailers need to work for not only customer satisfaction but also build trust as these ultimately lead to formation of habit and once a customer is habitual of purchasing from the same website, they will not look for product or price information.” This implies that once a company has the trust of new customers and the website is sticky, they can push their profit margin by nudging prices higher without fear of losing those newly loyal customers. The key is to get those new customers in the first place.
The researchers add that the companies “need to be true to the product that they are offering and the information that they are sharing so that they can build customer trust and more important the customer’s habit of returning to their website for all their purchase needs.”
Goyal, T. and Dutta, K. (2021) ‘Website stickiness: role of customer value, satisfaction, trust and habit’, Int. J. Technology Marketing, Vol. 15, No. 4, pp.426–447.