Abstract: Many retailers have tried to create a pleasant shopping atmosphere to enhance competitiveness through store renovation and redesign, but the store renovation does not improve the customer patronage and consumption level as expected. This article introduces familiarity as a moderate variable and customer trust as a mediator variable to construct a model and analyze the data from two field surveys of customer shopping experience to verify the mechanism by which shopping atmosphere affects new and old customers′ patronage intentions. The results show that the shopping atmosphere affects patronage intention through customer trust,a pleasant shopping atmosphere can increase the trust of new customers in shopping stores, but it has less impact on the old customers;the familiarity plays different roles at different stages, and there may be some other moderate variables similar to the familiarity, so that the impact of shopping atmosphere on patronage intention has different boundaries. Therefore, although the attractive shopping atmosphere is an effective marketing tool for a store, the influence of shopping atmosphere on patronage intention begins to weaken when the store enters the mature stage and has a stable customer group. In a certain period of time, there is no need to continue to increase investment in decorating stores, a more reasonable marketing strategy is to increase the means beyond the shopping atmosphere, and strive to improve customer trust and enhance customer patronage.

Key words: shopping atmosphere, familiarity, customer trust, a mediated moderate effect