Samenvatting

The paper explores how the customer experience bridges the relationship between signaling and trust in online shopping, following the framework of the Design-Based Research cycle. The main research question is as follows: “How does the end-to-end customer experience bridge the relationship between signaling and trust in online shopping?” The end-to-end customer experience entails online and offline interactions between the company and the customer. Signaling effectively conveys information, done through website design and content. The research question derives from the low customer retention rate in online grocery shopping after analysing historical data of smaller companies. The companies battle to win their customers’ loyalty but forget that trust drives customers (re)purchase behaviour and loyalty. However, building and maintaining customers’ trust is challenging as information asymmetry is high in online grocery shopping. Therefore, an alignment between gathered information in the form of website content and customers’ experience at delivery is crucial.