The Impact of E-Brand Trust on E-Loyalty Towards Online Fashion Clothing Industry in Sri Lanka

Abstract

The dynamic consumer preferences have pushed the fashion industry for innovative solutions and as a result, online platforms for shopping emerged. In the meantime, the fashion industry has developed a strong position in online platforms where consumers tend to purchase more often from online platforms. However, consumer behavior in the online fashion industry hasn't been tested under E Brand Trust and E Brand Loyalty in literature. Hence researching on this area will broaden the knowledge of the concepts and the industry as well. The purpose of this study is to explore the impact of e-brand trust on e-loyalty towards the online fashion clothing industry in Sri Lanka. This study employed a quantitative research design with a deductive approach. The population of this study was fashion-conscious and active online shopping customers within the western and central provinces of Sri Lanka. The convenience sampling method was used to select the sample of this study and 410 respondents were selected as the sample. Through conducting an online survey, data was gathered under a structured questionnaire to measure the main concepts of the study which are e-brand trust and e-loyalty. The researcher has used ebrand trust as the independent variable and e-loyalty as the dependent variable of this study to identify the relationship between these variables. The results state that; there is a significant positive relationship between e-brand trust and e- loyalty. The research was carried out with a sample size of 410, which was small to generalize the result into the entire population. The study is limited to the online fashion clothing industry hence, further investigations on the other contexts are required to generalize the findings. The results of the study state that the managers should pay a lot of attention to all dimensions of e-brand trust which are security, privacy, brand name, word of mouth, quality of information and good online experience. This study is the first to explore the impact of e-brand trust on eloyalty towards the online fashion clothing industry in Sri Lanka. Hence, this study contributes as a source of literature for future researchers.