3. A Model of Customer Retention in Business-Intensive Markets

At the dawn of e-commerce, there was a common feeling that it was senseless to talk about loyalty: it was believed that with the Internet, the ease of switching from one shop to another, and the opportunity to explore purchase alternatives in a very short time worldwide, would have discouraged any attempt by businesses to implement an e-loyalty strategy (Chen & Hitt, 2000; Jones, Motherbaugh & Beatty, 2000; Xu, Goedegebuure, & van der Heijden, 2006). Such a belief, however, was challenged by empirical evidence that Internet users visit their virtual stores much more often than any other traditional store (Inman, Winer, & Ferraro, 2009; Kaltcheva & Weitz, 2006; Adam, Dogramaci, Gangopadhyay & Yesha, 1999; Agrawal, Arjona & Lemmens, 2001; Allen, Kania & Yaeckel, 1998; Amit & Zott, 2001; Anderson, 2002; Bakos, 1997; Cameron, 1999; Brynjolfsson & Smith, 2000; Zwass, 1998 ). Moreover, the real explosion of e-commerce during the early years of the new economy led Internet companies to not deal at first with customer loyalty. Today, the situation of online markets is quite different: strong competition on the Web has encouraged businesses to take on a more critical and rational analysis of Internet marketing strategies, coming to the conclusion that in order to make a profit, traffic generation is not sufficient. Unlike the early diffusion of Internet technology, the success of a website does not depend on the number of visits but essentially on the frequency of use and its ability to “retain” customers, minimizing the churn rate (Shankar, Smith, & Rangaswamy, 2003; Zhang & He, 2012). The model developed in this study focuses, as anticipated, on business-to-business (B2B) online customer experience, empirically testing the resistance to change of a typically unloyal business customer, consistently with the possession of a shopping script induced by the supplier. Instrumental to this model is the definition of online loyalty (e-loyalty); as in offline markets, loyalty has a dual nature, behavioral and cognitive, this is also true in the case of e-loyalty (online loyalty), the two dimensions of which are kept strictly separate: e-retention and e-fidelity. The former concerns the inertial forms of loyalty, that is, repeated purchasing behavior somehow forced and not accompanied by an adequate satisfaction and emotional involvement. Thus, e-retention indicates the pure and simple behavioral aspect of loyalty that, only if combined with adequate mental fidelity (e-fidelity), turns into e-loyalty. The inertial forms of loyalty are represented by all those cases in which a customer is forced to stay on a certain website because of: