ABSTRACT

The study focused on Website Design and Customer Patronage of Electronic Vendors in Nigeria. The quality of website design is very important for any online store to attract customers. The world is gradually becoming a global village as a result of the invention of the internet. The developed nations of the world has made use of the internet and its related tools and this has transformed the way they live and in turn their marketing practices from the traditional practices to a digitalized practice. In the beginning of online shopping breakthrough in Nigeria, many firms registered their presence within the Nigerian Online market but to their greatest dismay, they were forced out of the market as a result the complexity of their website usability and poor visual and navigation design. Few research works have been done on measuring the relationship between website design and customer patronage in Lagos, Nigeria. There is paucity of explanatory models and theory building studies on website design and customer patronage. There is, therefore, scanty empirical works that had studied long term or non-financial measures of customer patronage and their relationship to website design in Nigeria. Various related literatures were reviewed which comprises of conceptual framework, theoretical review, empirical review and gap in literature was identified as paucity in empirical literature on the subject matter. For the purpose this study, cross sectional survey research design was adopted and the study involved the use of structured questionnaire designed on a 5-point Likert scale to measure the responses of the respondents on the influence of website design on customer patronage; while Multiple regression model will be employed to analyze the data generated for objectives 1-7, simple regression will be used for objective 8. Study population for the E-Vendors will comprise the staff strength of the top four (4) Electronic Vendors in Lagos, Nigeria which is 3948 Personnel record of various e-Vendor, 2017 and Yamene formula/the proportionate stratified random sampling techniques was used in ascertaining the sampling size for the study. The proportional allocation formula by Zaur Kumar was used to arrive at a sample size of 400 for e-vendors staff. 400 customers of the e-vendors were also conveniently sampled. It was found that all the components of Website design sampled showed strong relationships with customer patronage of e-vendors expect search engine optimization on loyalty. Hence, the study concludes that website design significantly influence customer patronage of e-vendors in Lagos, Nigeria. The study recommended that electronic vendors should on regular basis re-strategize and modifies their website designs to strategically position them to gain favorable customer patronage in fierce competitive environment. The major limitation of the study is on the small sample size (800) that was adopted for the study and future studies are advised to use a larger sample size which might add additional insights into the dimensions that are important to the customer patronage in the internet marketing.