This study provides two important results for retailers seeking to build customer relationships on the Internet. First, we investigate the relationship between these relational bonds and customer commitment on the Internet. The results suggest that the effective ways in which e-tailers engage in customer commitments can be classified into financial, social, and structural bonds, consistent with the classification that has been proposed for a physical retail environment. Financial bonds enhance customer relationships when a business provides special price offers or other financial incentives to loyal customers and are effective because one motivation for customers to engage in relational exchanges is to save money. Social bonds are personal ties that pertain to service dimensions that offer interpersonal interactions, friendships, and identifications. E-tailers may build social bonds with individual customers by recognizing them through e-mails personalized by name or two-way communications; they may also encourage social bonds among customers by facilitating customer-to-customer interactions and communities. These social bonds make customers tend toward self-disclosure, listening, and caring and help improve mutual understanding and openness between relationship partners and customers. Structural bonds refer to the value-adding services that are designed into the Web site, such as knowledge and information about the industry and product customization, that are not readily available elsewhere and expensive for customers to supply themselves if they terminate the relationship. Customers are motivated to perceive e-tailers that offer structural bonds as trustworthy, because such activities are interpreted as indications of the service firm’s capability to meet its obligations.

Recent studies have also shown that the offerings that service firms must provide vary according to different customer groups. Therefore, an e-tailer may focus on a specific relational bond to differentiate itself from its competition for a specific customer base. This leads to our second purpose: to investigate the effects of relational bonds on customer commitments across search-experience-credence products on the Internet. The results indicate that financial bonds are more important for search goods/services (products whose attributes can be easily evaluated before purchase) than for experience (products whose attributes cannot be evaluated until the product is purchased) or credence (products whose attributes are difficult to evaluate even after some trial has occurred) goods/services. Structural bonds are more important for credence and experience goods/services than for search products.

These findings generate some specific implications for e-tailors. First, this study identifies the key factors that create economic or psychological costs to prevent customer defection and bond online customers. For example, financial and social bonds create switching costs, in that customers would lose the accumulated points or personal rapport they have built up over time if they were to terminate the relationship. The structural bonds create switching costs because the valued services and adaptations devoted to the relationship would vanish if the relationship were terminated. Second, this study highlights the bonding strategies that lead to customer commitment to e-tailers in different industries. The results of this study suggest that e-tailers should focus more on financial bonds when the products or services are more standard, such as books and ticket services. When the products or services are more difficult to evaluate, such as health foods and insurance, e-tailers may focus more on structural bonds to enhance customer commitments. Third, e-tailers’ marketing budget allocation should be planned according to the results of this study. For an e-tailer providing standard goods or services, low price is recommended. If the e-tailer were to invest in  technology to provide detailed information or customized services, its rising operating costs would erode its ability to compete in terms of price. However, for an e-tailer providing products or services that are difficult to evaluate, value-added services are recommended as the primary investments to manage customer relationships. If it were to compete on the basis of low price, it would erode its resources for building the technologies to record customers’