A study of the loyalty to web based cyber trading systems

Recently, a portion of on-line stock brokerage has been rapidly increased to be more than 50%, on the basis of contracted money. The usage of wCTS (Web based Cyber Trading Systems) has now got into the steady state over the initial diffusion stage, which means wCTS has got more-than-half customer base in on-line service. Therefore, brokerage service providers have their competitive strategic focus on customer retention through the enhancement of customer loyalty. This study provides framework and survey results on explanation of wCTS user's loyalty, what and how factors affect wCTS user's loyalty. We adopt the results of early studies on information technology acceptance and diffusion such as TAM (Technology Acceptance Model) and IDT (Innovation Diffusion Theory). We also referred loyalty theory of marketing area and studies on CTS usage. We categorized explanation factors as three groups: characteristics of users, characteristics of system, social environment. And we assumed that these three factors could affect the loyalty through two parameters: customer satisfaction and trust to the system. This study firstly shows that the ease of use and usefulness, the major factors of TAM, can also be applied to the loyalty of wCTS with resulting that the usefulness is more important than the ease of use in wCTS. Secondly, it shows that the innovative and risk-sensitive user has the lower degree of loyalty. Thirdly, it shows that the satisfaction and trust impact the loyalty simultaneously, the trust particularly impacts more strongly than the loyalty, due to the characteristics of monetary transaction in wCTS. This study provides meaningful results to the other on-line EC service fields as a first empirical research regarding the loyalty to wCTS which is a typical on-line EC service.