Practice Makes Preference

In the development of loyalty among online shoppers, skill acquisition appears to be playing an important role. Of particular interest is Johnson et al.'s (2003) finding that increasing Web site loyalty is closely related to decreasing amounts of time being spent at the Web site. As the authors point out, this pattern is very similar to other learning curves that follow the Power Law of Practice (Newell and Rosenbloom, 1987). While debate continues over the psychological processes that drive the power function of the learning curve (see for example, Kirsner and Speelman, 1996; Logan, 1988; Palmeri, 1999; Rickard, 1997), the importance of this type of learning and skill acquisition in the development of interface loyalty is becoming increasingly clear. Johnson et al. (2003, p. 62) describe it this way:

Imagine a user visiting a Web site to purchase a compact disc (CD). This user must first learn how to use the Web site to accomplish this goal. We believe that after the CD has been purchased, having learned to use this site raises its attractiveness relative to competing sites for the consumer, and all other things being equal (e.g., fulfillment), the site will be more likely to be used in the future than a competitor. Further use reinforces this difference because practice makes the first site more efficient to use and increases the difference in effort between using any other site and simply returning to the first site, where browsing and buying can be executed at the fastest rate. This reinforcement generates an increasing advantage for the initial site.

These observations have not been lost on those seeking to build companies on the Web. Since the early days of e-commerce, an argument has been made for the importance of developing an experienced user base at the expense of short- term profitability (Krishnamurthy, 2002, Ch. 6). According to Shapiro and Varian (1999), one of the primary advantages of building an installed user base in the information age is the ubiquity of switching costs. They contend that once a buyer has committed to using a particular brand, they become predisposed to that particular brand and are much less likely to search for alternatives or switch to competitors . The importance of developing an installed base of users is evident in the fundamental role played by the growth over profit approach in the early business models of many of the Web's leading companies from Yahoo to iVillage and from Amazon to WebMD. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com explains the company's initial commitment to growth over profit this way: 'Our initial strategy was very focused and very unidimensional. It was GBF: Get Big Fast. We put that on our shirts at the company picnic: They said GET BIG FAST, and on the back, EAT ANOTHER HOT DOG' (Brooker, 2000). Although the link between learning and loyalty is important in a wide variety of domains (Ratchford, 2001), it may be of particular relevance to online shopping because of the latter's relative novelty and because e-commerce allows the vendor to control and personalize the shopping environment to a much greater degree than traditional channels (e.g., H ubl, Dellaert, Murray, and Trifts, 2004).