Customer’S Loyalty: The Role of Shopping Well-Being in Shopping Center

Abstract

Nowadays, the competitive ratio between the retail centres and online shopping is greatly increasing due to the impacts of technological developments causing changes to customer behaviour. For this reason, shopping centres need to adjust their operations in order to continually attract more customers to enter these centres. Therefore, the managers of physical shopping centres must understand the insights regarding customers and provide them with something that the online world cannot fulfil. Human beings are creatures who love to socialise, and the issue of the shopping well-being will lead to customer loyalty; thus, there is a need to provide shopping centre executives with a better understanding of how to implement shopping well-being in order to manipulate the behaviours of customers.

This study is a quantitative research, in which online questionnaires were used to collect data from 306 samples, and Partial Least Square SEM (PLS-SEM) was employed to analyse the data. The results indicate that the factors that have a direct effect on customer loyalty are the Shopping Centre Attractiveness, Shopping Experience and Shopping Well-Being, whilst the factors that directly affect the Shopping Well-Being are the Shopping Centre Attractiveness and Shopping Experience.

From the findings, it can be concluded that the factor which has a direct effect on customer loyalty is the Shopping Well-being, with the direct influence value of 0.538. This factor is the highest value that directly affects the loyalty of the customers. Thus, the executives and related parties of the shopping centres should give importance to this aspect by, for example, categorizing their group of stores to be easily found, designing various signs to clearly communicate, conducting clean building management that provides sufficient light and good ventilation to respond to sensory comfort, and ensuring that there are enough parking areas and public toilets. All of these are the factors that can create a pleasant feeling of Shopping Well-being.

As for the increasing of the Shopping Experience that has an indirect effect on customer loyalty and a direct effect on the Shopping Well-being, the indirect influence value was 0.332, which is the highest value affecting customer loyalty. As a result, the service providers and the related parties should consider this matter as their top priority, such as effective building resource management and allocation of facilities in order to provide the highest level of comfort and a positive impression after the customers have entered to receive the service.