2. E-commerce and Brand Loyalty
• Electronic commerce, commonly written as E-Commerce or e-
Commerce, is the trading or facilitation of trading in products
or services using computer networks, such as the Internet or
online social networks. For example online shopping, electronic
data interchange, business trading, etc.
• Brand loyalty is the tendency of consumers to continue buying
the same brands of goods rather than the competing brands.
• Brand loyalty in e-commerce : In this project, we will display
how consumers are motivated to use only a few shopping
websites to fulfil their day to day needs.
3. Importance of Brand Loyalty in E-Commerce
• ADVERTISING IS EXPENSIVE AND RISKY
Advertising can be effective in getting you more customers but it can be expensive and risky. In
contrast, repeat customers are already aware of you and, if they had a good experience the first
time, they are much more likely to buy from you again. There is a 60-70% chance of selling to an
existing customer while only a 5-20% chance of selling to new customers.
• CUSTOMER RETENTION
It costs about 5 to 10 times more to find a new customer than to keep your existing one. Current
customers tend to spend 67% more than new customers do. Keep your customers coming back to
your business by using customer loyalty programs that work and add value. Higher sales volumes,
premium pricing ability, and retaining rather than seeking customers are the important aspects of
brand loyalty.
4. • Cross-selling Opportunities
Customers who exhibit brand loyalty have a relationship with your
business. They trust you to provide quality products and customer service.
This creates a great opportunity to fulfil more of your customers' needs.
One can make sales to loyal customers across product lines and thus
increase overall sales volume without needing to focus so much on
attracting new customers.
Protects You From the Competition
The more loyal your customers tend to be, the safer you will be from the
draw of the competition. Establishing strong brand loyalty can make you
practically immune to competitive forces. This is especially important in
places where new players enter the marketplace often.
5. • Word-of-Mouth Marketing
Loyal customers can also bring you new customers. Customers that have great
relationships with businesses tend to talk about it. Happy and satisfied customers
who keep coming back to you are very likely to refer others who may need your
product and/or services.
Benefit of the Doubt
Let's face it; things go awry sometimes - even in the best businesses. Sometimes we
get an order wrong, don't meet a deadline, or aren't able to deliver on promises
made to customers. In today's economy, it's even easier for little hiccups such as
these an others to take place in business. These types of mistakes can damage your
business' reputation in the eyes of a new customer. A scheduling error can make
your firm seem disorganized and unreliable. This is a very easy way to lose
customers. The good news is, loyal customers are much more likely to give you the
benefit of the doubt and/or overlook errors. If you maintain the level of customer
service and quality that it takes to achieve brand loyalty in the first place, your
customers will be willing to forgive you when bad things happen.
6. Challenges in establishing Brand Loyalty
• Failing to keep up with consumer expectations
Declining customer loyalty has been an issue even for companies that invest
heavily in improving their service. Customers don’t care that the service they
are receiving is better than it was a year ago – they use other ‘best-in-class’
companies as a benchmark. If Amazon deals with a faulty product delivery
immediately and without question, the customer will quickly expect the same
level of service from their local supermarket.
• Failing loyalty programmes
Many companies saw the loyalty card as a shortcut to creating customer
loyalty. In fact, latest studies agree that loyalty cards actually slash profit
margins on existing customers, losing money rather than creating loyalty.
7. • Everything is now transparent
Smartphones and tablets have made the world more transparent than
ever. More than half of consumers use their mobile devices to compare
prices while shopping, making it easy to find a better deal elsewhere
• Failing to focus on the customer experience as a whole
When companies are divided into various departments, each department
is inevitably responsible for a different aspect of the customer relationship.
Often there is a lack of contact between sales and after sales teams, while
the finance team work three floors down. Research has shown that
inconsistencies and lack of understanding across these various touch
points can actually cause disloyalty, rather than customer dissatisfaction
with one particular interaction.
8. • Lack of unique relevance to consumers.
If a customer is disloyal, they are really saying that a product or service
was not relevant enough for them to remain a customer. That particular
product or service did not stand out from the competition because too
little thought has been put into what role the brand should play in the
customer’s life. The customer simply made a rational decision, rather
than having any emotional attachment
• Perceived notions about quality and timely delivery
There are businesses which still command personal touch and
guarantee, therefore people hesitate buying such products online one
such field being clothing industry because of variations in sizes, material,
colors, etc.
9. Measures to establish Brand Loyalty
• From the above analysis, we can see that large number of college
students are being observed for this survey, out of which 70% are
female and 30% male.
• From those 70% female, 78.6% represent female of age between 0-20
years and 17.8% are between 21-30 years. This shows that we are
analyzing young generation’s preferences.
• From the websites given, Amazon constituted a large % used by the
youngsters which constitutes 57.1% of the total respondents i.e.
covers more than half of the responses seconded by Flipkart securing
31.4%.