The factors influencing the formation of mobile commerce customer loyalty in Malaysia

As a result from the increasing usage of smartphone and internet, mobile commerce (m-commerce) has progressively become the most prominent mode of shopping in Malaysia. The irrefutable fact about Malaysian m-commerce market's potential growth has encouraged many online marketplace companies around the globe to invest in Malaysian digital landscape, triggering fierce competition among these companies to compete and succeed in the online marketplace. Nevertheless, with minimal exposure on the Malaysian market and shopping behaviour of customers, most of these online marketplace companies struggle to maintain their business performances and some have even shut down their business operations in the nation. Customer loyalty has been regarded as an essential tool which ultimately determines the growth and sustainability of an online marketplace in this competitive business environment that offers customers with plethora of choices to make their purchases. Nonetheless, as far as this matter is concerned, there is no universal theory which completely explains the development of customer loyalty particularly in the context of m-commerce. In response to this issue, the present research suggests a customer loyalty model built of Stimulus-Organism-Response model that empirically evaluates and quantifies the effect of mobile service quality, relationship marketing constructs (trust, commitment and satisfaction) on m-commerce customer loyalty; effect of mobile service quality on relationship marketing constructs; and the mediating effect of relationship marketing constructs on the relationship between mobile service quality and customer loyalty. All the constructs in this study were conceptualized and measured reflectively with all the items and the constructs reflected were assessed using a five-point likert scale. This research presents the empirical findings from an online survey of 411 respondents drawn through convenience sampling. The collected data were analysed through the application of the Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) and Partial Least Square (PLS). The outcome of the study had revealed that mobile service quality and all three relationship marketing constructs significantly affect m-commerce customer loyalty (R2 = 0.628). In addition, this research had also proved that all the dimensions of relationship marketing to partially mediate the relationship between mobile service quality and customer loyalty. This research had also validated a measuring scale designed specifically to measure service quality in m-commerce settings and concludes with an in-depth discussion on the main findings, implications, limitations and recommendations for the future study.