Title: Building e-loyalty for e-retailers: role of justice perception and consumer forgiveness

Authors: Fatma Özge Baruönü Latif; Aypar Uslu

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, Doğuş University, İstanbul, 34722, Turkey ' Department of Business Administration, Doğuş University, İstanbul, 34722, Turkey

Abstract: This study aims at exploring e-loyalty in the e-commerce context by emphasising the mediating roles of customer forgiveness with respect to the perceived fairness of recovery efforts and customers' e-loyalty towards eretailers. The data were collected from 380 respondents who experienced an online failure and had a recovery. This study demonstrates that the customers who experienced a service failure and received recovery evaluated functional justice (distributive, procedural and informational), and relational justice (interpersonal justice) in a different way. On the other hand, this research shows whilst emotional forgiveness mediates the relationship between functional justice and e-loyalty, forgiveness is affected by a religious commitment as well as fairness perception of customers. However, customers' empathy is not an indicator of forgiveness in e-commerce context. The results help e-commerce providers to develop effective recovery strategies and to empower the interactional role of virtual assistants to build a more empathetic relationship with the victims.

Keywords: empathy; religious commitment; perceived fairness; justice; Turkey; e-retailer; online shopping; online retailer.

DOI: 10.1504/MEJM.2019.098597

Middle East Journal of Management, 2019 Vol.6 No.3, pp.298 - 317

Received: 09 Dec 2017
Accepted: 17 Mar 2018
Published online: 28 Mar 2019 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article