THE INFLUENCE OF WEBSITE ENVIRONMENT ON BRAND LOYALTY: BRAND TRUST AND BRAND AFFECT AS MEDIATORS

Previous studies on e-commerce have focused on the influence of the online website environment on purchasing decisions but rarely examined online brand loyalty from perspectives of brand trust and brand affect. Though antecedents of brand affect and trust have received attention, the relationship among these antecedents, brand affect and brand trust still remains unclear. Therefore, this study views website environmental design and website interactivity as the independent variables, brand trust and brand affect as the mediators, and brand loyalty as the dependent variable to construct a conceptual model. We choose online bookstores as the research sample and conduct Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to test the hypotheses. Study result shows that website environment design and interactivity will generate higher brand loyalty through an increase in brand affect and brand trust. Managerial implications and suggestions for future research are provided in the final section.