Oliver (1999) suggested that customer satisfaction developed by way of product usage, is a necessary step in loyalty formation. But it becomes less significant as loyalty begins to set through other mechanisms such as individual fortitude (i.e., the degree to which the consumer resists competitive pressure to switch over to another brand) and social bonding (i.e., the degree to which the community or the society supports the consumer to remain loyal).
Satisfaction has been defined as an "evaluation of the perceived discrepancy between prior expectations... and the actual performance of the product" (Tse and Wilton 1988, p. 204; see also Oliver 1980).
In Oliver (1997), satisfaction is defined as pleasurable fulfilment. That is, the consumer senses that consumption fulfils some need, desire, goal, or so forth and that this fulfilment is pleasurable. Thus. Satisfaction is the consumer's sense that consumption provides outcomes against a standard of pleasure versus displeasure. For satisfaction lo affect loyalty, frequent or cumulative satisfaction is required so that individual satisfaction episodes become aggregated or blended. As will be argued here, however, more than this is needed for determined loyalty to occur. The consumer may require movement to a different conceptual plane—in all likelihood, one that transcends satisfaction
Ribbink et al.(2004) argue that little is known about the mechanisms involved in generating customer loyalty on the internet, however among several antecedents proposed in the literature, satisfaction stands considerably. In his study on Oliver (1999) found that satisfaction is an essential ingredient for the loyalty, however author also claims that satisfaction does not always lead to loyalty. Shankar et al.(2003) states that it is possible for a customer to be loyal without being highly satisfied (e.g., when there are few other choices) and vice a versa.
Customer e-commerce satisfaction can be defined as the evaluation of the reaction or feeling of a customer in relation to his/her experience with all aspects of an e-commerce system put in place by an organization to market. However, this concept does not capture the quality of the physical product, since not all e-commerce companies are the producers of the goods they sell such as Amazon.com (Molla and Licker, 2001). According to Mukhopadhyay et al.(2008), consumer satisfaction starts with the sales experience and continues up to post-sales services.