The perspective of e-business sustainability and website accessibility of online stores

Abstract

E-commerce’s latest trends, highlighted by the global phenomena of the COVID-19 pandemic, explicitly show substantial changes in the online consumers’ behavior as well. More and more specialists are talking about the emergence of a new paradigm in consumption, and of possible evolutions toward sustainable consumption. The purpose of this research is to investigate how the antecedents of e-loyalty have changed their effect on consumer attitudes and perceptions of e-commerce sites. The results, obtained through a structural model of 523 validated questionnaires of Romanian consumers of electronic and household appliances, show the importance of the effect of website accessibility, a factor that, until recently, exerted an influence mediated by other elements grouped either under the umbrella of site quality or site design. The model validated after the analysis shows the direct effect of the accessibility of the websites on e-loyalty, satisfaction and trust of the consumers. Based on the results, the value of this study lies in the fact that it presents arguments on how the boost of e-commerce systems leads to sales processes’ sustainability improvement and, to the same extent, the improvement of the ways for reporting sustainability using IT tools (online databases with customers, software integrated into e-commerce platforms, electronic financial management).