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With the increasingly fierce market competition, the focus of marketing has changed from product-oriented to customer-oriented, customer loyalty theory has always been a hot research in marketing. While the market environment of China’s retail industry is undergoing drastic changes:Expanding size of the market, a growing number of transnational retail giants to enter the Chinese market. In this context, only the customer loyalty is the core advantage of retail enterprises to participate in the competitions. Therefore, this paper is based on China’s retail industry, to investigate the relationship between customer satisfaction, service quality, customer value, customer trust and customer commitment and the customer loyalty on the basis of previous studies, looking forward to explore the formation mechanism of customer loyalty in retailing sector, in order to give some enlightenment to retail enterprises.In this paper, the main focus is the impacts of customer satisfaction, service quality, customer value, customer trust and customer commitment on customer loyalty in retailing industry, as well as the relationship between the four dimensions of customer loyalty. Accordingly, a theoretical model, including service quality, customer value, customer satisfaction, customer trust, customer commitment as independent variables, customer loyalty as the dependent variable, was built up and also tested by actual data. Several amendments to the model were made based on the results of empirical analysis.This study is aimed at all consumer customers to retail stores. We distributed 500 pieces of questionnaires to customers in seven retail enterprises of Wenzhou,Hangzhou,and Shanghai city by means of sample survey,423 were returned. The empirical data was analyzed by SPSS16.0 statistical software, and the main conclusions include:(1) customer loyalty in retailing industry is a multidimensional concept, and it can be divided into cognitive loyalty, affective loyalty, conative loyalty and action loyalty in four dimensions. (2) the formation of customer loyalty in retailing industry is the result of a variety of factors, such as service quality, customer value, customer trust, customer commitment and customer satisfaction, among which customer commitment and customer value have more significant impacts on it both directly and indirectly. (3) customer satisfaction is a necessary precondition of customer loyalty, and also an intermediary variable for other factors to play a role. (4) customer commitment is a prerequisite of customer satisfaction.The conclusion of this paper is brought by the empirical study of retailing, and be able to directly serve the retail industry. However, it needs to be deserved further studies because of the small scope of survey and inadequacy of all the factors that affect customer loyalty. In addition, the results show that customer commitment and customer value are the most important factors of customer loyalty, while both are multi-dimensional concept, so future research can probe the mechanism for effects of each dimensions of them on customer loyalty.
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