Online Shopping Experience and Customer Satisfaction in Nigeria's Eastern Region

The twenty-first century has experienced one of the most remarkable transformations in the business economy globally. Firms are not only transforming production processes to embrace technological changes but are also incorporating technological developments in the way and manner by which customers are served. The widespread use of the internet technology and access to mobile technologies has also improved customers’ ability to make choices and shopping decisions. As customers are becoming increasingly enlightened, many of them are also exploring dynamic measures in their shopping activities. Thus, customers now surf the internet in search of the solutions to their needs. In Nigeria, many customers now patronize several electronic commerce stores; however, this has brought newer dimensions to customer experience. Whether customers would be willing to re-patronize these online stores depends to a great extent on their online shopping experiences and the level of satisfaction obtained after a previous shopping experience. This study therefore sets out to explore how online customer experience, online convenience, online return policies, and online product quality affect the online customers’ satisfaction. The descriptive research design was used in the study, and the questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 377 respondents who were purposively collected from the study’s population. Data were presented in tables, and the one-sample T-test was used to test the study’s hypotheses. Research findings show that all four constructs, viz., customer experience, convenience, return policies, and product quality, were strong influencers of online customers’ satisfaction. The study therefore recommended that businesses should put measures in place to capture customers’ total expectations in order to be able to capture these into their product offerings, for improved customer satisfaction levels.