Customer loyalty is one of the important topics in marketing and entrepreneurship. Many companies are utilizing a variety of tools such as excellent products, and loyalty programs to build true customer loyalty. The existing literature shows solid evidences of customer satisfaction-loyalty-profit chain in business industries (Kumar and Reinartz 2012). Chen (2012) also finds commitment, trust, involvement, and perceived value as mediators to build customer loyalty in the chain.

We have a number of marketing matrices to measure customer loyalty such as retention rate, share of wallet, survival rate and average customer duration. Retention rate is the most commonly used one among these matrices. Retention rate is also called repeated purchase rate. Understanding customer repeated purchase behavior will help business vendors formulate effective marketing strategies, boost customer loyalty and achieve the success of entrepreneurship. Customer loyalty and repeated purchases have been widely investigated in the context of brick-and-mortar stores in the literature. However, to the best knowledge of ours, customer loyalty and repeated purchases at online auction marketplaces have not been well studied. The existing studies in this area in the literature also have certain limitations. For examples, Chen et al. (2016) explore a number of factors affecting buyers’ purchase and repurchase intentions at online auction marketplaces. They use a simulated market experiment instead of using real online auction data. Tu, Fang and Lin (2012) use a Structure Equation Model to study the methods that online auction sites use to attract buyers to come back.  The study is done from the perspectives of website developers instead of from common business sellers. Our study intends to explore the untapped areas about online customer loyalty from sellers’ and entrepreneurs’ perspectives by using real business data from eBay.