A Study of the Customer Shopping Behavior and Effective Factors on Building Up Customer Loyalty

IntroductionIn markets having growing competition, maintaining a strong bond with customers by virtue of building up loyalty in consumers seem to be a key factor in achieving the market share and creating a competitive privilege. Loyal customers are crucial for keeping the trade alive and well, mainly because attracting new customers is remarkably more costly than keeping the older ones (Deng et al., 2010). The marketing science makes every endeavor to affect the manner of consumer behavior. This will have some consequences for organizations, customers and the society. Making use of the consumer behavior knowledge aiming at the marketing strategy expansion is a sort of art (Samadi, et al., 2010).The shopping behavior is made up of all the psychological, social, physical behaviors of potential customers, in the same way that they would be aware of evaluating, buying and consuming and talk about the products and services with others (Patil, 2007).The customer with a real shopping intention sets out on buying a certain amount of products due to their payment capabilities. If the companies are able to understand the customer shopping behavior and personalize the recommendation system of their products by means of their own information, they can draw on several different types of business opportunities.Recommending products in order to attract customers and obviating their needs in highly competitive environments is important (Bae & Kim, 2010). As markets become more and more competitive, many companies realize the importance of keeping their customers. And some of them embark on miscellaneous activities aiming at enhancing the customer loyalty. In fact, the benefits of customer loyalty are widely recognized in trading (Mcmullan and Gilmore, 2008). Consumers are not necessarily looking for buying commodities. They would like to solve their problems and obviate their needs. One of the major concerns of any store in using marketing tactics for increasing the sale and having contact with the customer is the effect of these tactics on customers (Samadi, et al., 2010).The customer loyalty plans do not necessarily focus on trying to raise their sales revenue. They are used in keeping the customers, which lead to better monetary results (Gable et al., 2008). The importance and benefits of attracting and keeping the loyal customers comes from a common consent that customer loyalty brings profitability. In this sense in order to understand the concept of loyalty completely, we need to build up loyalty in the customer as a long-term investment which leads to an emphasis on a need for management of keeping the bond between the customers and providers (Rauyruen & Miller). While some organizations are satisfied by focusing on easy access to customer satisfaction, obtaining and keeping the customer loyalty is considered to be the ultimate goal of many contemporary service providers. Loyal customers buy more, are eager to buy more, are easily accessible and act as enthusiastic fans for our companies (Harris & Goode, 2004).Due to the significance of the issue, there have been some researches carried out in relation to shopping behavior especially loyalty. The study done by Taylor et al., to say one of them, in which the role of the brand value and trust in brand is emphasized in industrial customer loyalty. It is also concluded that these two have a determining role in customer loyalty. Moreover, Lofgren et al. have examined the satisfaction and evaluation ways while shopping and behavior while using their products. They concluded that there is a remarkable distinction between the effect of customer satisfaction on their loyalty while shopping and by the time they are using the products. Deng et al. in their studies on determining factors in satisfaction and loyalty came to this conclusion that trust, operational value and emotional value lead to building up satisfaction. Trust and costs of change and satisfaction increase the customer loyalty. …