سابقه وفاداری مشتری در بازار الکترونیکی بنگاه به بنگاه (B2B)

The globalization of economic activity and the emergence of the Internet have led to the appearance of a new model of business-to-business (B2B) known as the electronic B2B market or e-marketplace which facilitates the establishment of marketing relationships between buyers and sellers. In view of the limited research in this area, the present study examines the elements that may influence client (i.e., user) loyalty in this context. The basis of the study is an analysis of empirical data provided by 197 Spanish e-marketplace selling-side users, investigating the influence of image, quality, satisfaction, and value on client loyalty. The results indicated that satisfaction had no direct impact on client loyalty, but that the e-marketplace's image and user-perceived quality and value are antecedents of its clients' loyalty.

Recent decades have seen increasing interest in establishing what are the marketing relationships between buyers and sellers in the business-to-business (B2B) area. In these relationships, a major role is being played by the new information and communications technologies. In particular, the dramatic growth in firms' use of the Internet for business transactions has led to the emergence of what has come to be known as B2B e-commerce, and a new business model known as business-to-business marketplaces (or simply e-marketplaces) in which many buying and selling firms access a given Web site or platform to transact their business. For these new channels to be viable, customers must perceive them as effective and efficient (Parasuraman, Zeithaml, & Malhotra, 2005). For this reason, issues related to client loyalty and the factors that affect it take on a particular relevance. Recently, numerous studies have been published which analyze the antecedents of client loyalty in the field of e-commerce between businesses and consumers, B2C (Akinci et al., 2010, Caruana and Ewing, 2010 and Ding et al., 2011). Despite the importance of this theme, however, there have been relatively few studies conceptualizing and investigating the antecedents of client loyalty in the relationships between firms (B2B), whether in a traditional (Lam et al., 2004, Oliver, 1999 and Sirdeshmukh et al., 2002) or in an electronic B2B environment. Indeed, for the case of e-marketplaces our review of the literature found no article dealing with this question. One of the aims of the present study was therefore to help fill this gap in research. We believe that client loyalty is crucial to a firm's survival, especially in the context of e-commerce. This loyalty is not achieved simply with technology, but also requires improving the customer's experience. Although Internet brings relationships with customers closer, the basic laws and rewards of building customer relationships have not changed. What has changed is the place where these rules hold and the speed with which firms must improve their products and services if they want to attain and maintain client loyalty (Reichheld & Schefter, 2000). Since acquiring a customer through the Web is expensive, and competition is just a click away, loyalty in electronic environments, known as e-loyalty, becomes essential both economically and competitively (Semeijn, Van Riel, Van Birgelen, & Streukens, 2005). Firms must therefore strive to be the best to continually satisfy their customers and establish long-term relationships with them (Anderson and Weitz, 1992 and Morgan and Hunt, 1994). In order to help attain such long-term relationships between the e-marketplace and its users, an objective of the present study was to test empirically a model in which image, perceived quality, perceived value, and customer satisfaction are defined as antecedents of client loyalty. In particular, we seek to understand how the perceived quality of the service provided by the e-marketplace influences perceived value, satisfaction, and loyalty. The other objectives were to examine the importance of the e-marketplace's image on the customer's perceived quality, satisfaction, and loyalty, to determine the influence of value on customer satisfaction and loyalty, and to clarify the relationships between customer satisfaction and loyalty to the B2B e-marketplace. The rest of this communication is organized as follows. In Section 2, we review the literature on these variables, and present the main research hypotheses which we used to explore the principal antecedents of the construction of client loyalty. In 3 and 4, we describe the design of the data collection and acquisition tool and the analysis of the data, respectively. The main results of the study are presented in Section 5, and discussed, together with the conclusions that can be drawn from them, in Section 6. Finally, Section 7 describes the implications of the research, its limitations, and future lines of research.

The objective of the present work has been to review the main antecedents of client loyalty, and to propose a (structural equation) model that provides insight into the relationships between these antecedents in the context of B2B e-marketplaces. The factor analysis applied to the e-merQual scale generated four factors in the B2B e-marketplace context, not too different from published results obtained in B2C e-commerce contexts (Caruana and Ewing, 2006, Ladhari, 2010, Parasuraman et al., 2005, Wolfinbarger and Gilly, 2003, Yoo and Donthu, 2001 and Zeithaml, 2002). We could find no previous study in the literature analyzing the antecedents of loyalty in the context of B2B e-marketplaces. We therefore believe this study to be ground-breaking in that it represents a first effort in the academic literature to determine which factors the vendor users consider of most importance for their loyalty to be gained and maintained. Some interesting conclusions emerge from the present results. First, there is the clear importance of the e-marketplace's “image”, “perceived quality”, and “value” in gaining the vendor users' loyalty. Second, we were surprised that the users' satisfaction has no direct influence on their loyalty. These findings are clearly different from those of previous research on both online B2C and online B2B e-commerce which report strong evidence for such a relationship (Chumpitaz and Paparoidamis, 2004, Ding et al., 2011, Luarn and Lin, 2003 and Zhang and Prybutok, 2005). And third, the perceived quality of the services provided by the e-marketplace was not found to influence its vendor users' satisfaction, although this relationship has been reported to hold in various B2C e-commerce studies (Collier and Bienstock, 2006, Kim and Stoel, 2004 and Zeithaml, 2002). The qualitative information that we collected through the observations that were left open for comment in the questionnaire showed the users to acknowledge that e-marketplaces could be clearly positive if they exploited their potential to the full, but that this is not happening in Spain's construction sector. The users perceive that, in spite of efforts to provide quality, there is much duplication in the online and offline environments. Since we found a positive relationship between value and satisfaction, we think that value plays a mediatory role between quality and user satisfaction. Furthermore, practically all of the users interviewed belong to the Obralia e-marketplace which is characterized by being partial, i.e., it was created and is directed by major contractor firms in Spain's construction sector. According to the comments of some users, these firms could be using coercive strategies to attract users, which would explain the absence of any relationship between satisfaction and loyalty. Perceived quality is the most important factor in gaining user loyalty. This is consistent with previous research in both traditional and e-commerce contexts (Caruana and Ewing, 2006, Chumpitaz and Paparoidamis, 2004, Cronin and Taylor, 1992, Parasuraman et al., 1988, Parasuraman et al., 2005, Patterson, 1995 and Rauyruen and Miller, 2007). We therefore believe that investment in quality in the management of the e-marketplace's services is one of the keys to its competitive advantage in achieving its users' loyalty. The second element in order of importance to ensure the maintenance of long-term relationships with the user is the care of the e-marketplace's image. Improvements to the image both contribute to ensuring the user's loyalty and increase the user's tendency to perceive greater service quality (Bloemer and Ruyter, 1998 and Lai et al., 2009) and satisfaction. We found no previous study in the literature examining these relationships in the context of B2B e-commerce. A third element that can ensure users return to the Web site to conduct their transactions is the added value they get from the services the site provides. While there is a lack of research in the industrial e-commerce context, in the non-electronic context Briggs and Grisaffe (2010) also find that, in B2B transactions, economic value is essential to ensuring client loyalty. With respect to the implications for e-marketplace managers, we suggest that one way to differentiate oneself from the competition is to develop strategies that are directed at improving the e-marketplace's image and to strive to offer superior levels of quality. Such efforts can be expected to directly foster user loyalty. With respect to quality in particular, the present study has identified four key factors that managers need to bear in mind to achieve and maintain high levels of quality — reliability and privacy, efficiency, added value, and information usefulness. We believe that managers need to develop marketing strategies that contribute to building and consolidating relationships with their users, for example, facilitating the establishment of open lines of communication aimed at ensuring the quality of the services that are provided. While quality is a necessary condition for user satisfaction to be achieved and maintained, it is not sufficient in itself. The users must perceive that what they are receiving is of value above what they have to contribute, i.e., that the e-marketplace provides added value. This value will then directly and positively influence both their satisfaction and their loyalty.1