How to Enhance Vendor-Specific Perceived Effectiveness of E-Commerce Institutional Mechanisms and Online Shopper Loyalty

Online shopping, amassive information technology (IT)-mediated industry, is vulnerable to the risks of personal information leaks, credit card fraud, and nonreceipt of goods. These risks can cause shoppers to discontinue their use of ashopping website. To mitigate the risks, we propose that shopping websites develop risk-reducing mechanisms to enhance shoppers’ vendor-specific perceived effectiveness of e-commerce institutional mechanisms (VS-PEEIM), aconstruct new to the literature. We examined the relations among website quality, VS-PEEIM, and shopper loyalty. We found that VS-PEEIM mediates the impacts of service quality and information quality on shopper loyalty. Moreover, VS-PEEIM can explain more variance in loyalty than information quality and service quality can explain. Practically, our findings offer anew means for e-commerce firms to enhance shopper loyalty. Theoretically, our study proposes anew concept, VS-PEEIM, avendor-specific version of PEEIM, and verifies its influence on shopper loyalty, offering new knowledge on better using VS-PEEIM.