اثرات لذت بردن از نتیجه، فرایند و خرید بر رفتار مصرف کننده آنلاین
کد مقاله | سال انتشار | تعداد صفحات مقاله انگلیسی |
---|---|---|
1785 | 2006 | 10 صفحه PDF |
Publisher : Elsevier - Science Direct (الزویر - ساینس دایرکت)
Journal : Electronic Commerce Research and Applications, Volume 5, Issue 4, Winter 2006, Pages 272–281
چکیده انگلیسی
Customer value is one of the most powerful forces in today’s marketplace and emerging as the strategic imperative for the 1990s. In this study, we proposed a three-component customer value model for e-commerce. Drawing upon the literature in marketing and information systems, our research model decomposed customer value into process value, outcome value, and shopping enjoyment. The results from this study showed that outcome value and process value contributed significantly to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Also, evidences confirmed that customer satisfaction affect customer loyalty. Enjoyment, however, had no significant positive impact on customer satisfaction.
مقدمه انگلیسی
Despite its newness, e-commerce is revolutionizing many aspects of the transactions between consumers and firms [1]. This revolution has resulted in a need to understand consumer behaviour online because of the enormous impact from the use of IT and its consequential impact on market success [2]. A key aspect of traditional consumer behaviour is the understanding of customer value perceptions. Customer value is one of the most powerful forces in today’s marketplace [3] and [4] and was “emerging as the strategic imperative (p. 53)” for the 1990s [5]. From a consumer’s perspective, obtaining value is a fundamental purchase goal and pivotal to all successful exchange transactions [6]. Thus, it plays an important role in predicting customer’s choice and future (re)purchase intentions [7], [8], [9] and [10], increasing market share and profitability [11], and achieving competitive advantage [12]. Customer value can be equally important in e-commerce [13] because inducing people to visit a site involves some of the same marketing methods as attracting visitors to a retail outlet [2]. However, despite the importance of customer value in traditional marketing research, little has been written about the meaning of customer value as well as its roles in the e-commerce context. Simply applying the customer value theories developed in offline environments to online contexts is fairly risky because consumers behave differently when they shop online [13]. While the offline customer value is mainly determined by product [8], in online retailing settings, not only the product, but also the online store and the Internet channel can contribute to customer value [14]. Though product value is relatively well understood in the literature, the added value from the use of Internet channel and store specific effort online is rarely studied. Moreover, the impact of different aspects of the customer value on a company’s online performance is unclear. Therefore, the current research objectives are to (1) present a clearer understanding of online customer value by examining its key components; (2) study its impact on e-commerce competition. To fulfil these aims, taking a consumer rather than system user perspective, we propose the concepts of process value, outcome value and enjoyment as three key customer value components for online retailing, and investigate their impact on online customer satisfaction and loyalty.
نتیجه گیری انگلیسی
In this study, a three-component online customer value model was proposed. Their impacts on customer satisfaction and loyalty were tested. Based on our conceptual model of the linkages between the constructs, our results generally support the model and confirm the hypotheses. The proposed research model explains 0.51 of the variance in customer satisfaction and 0.58 of variance in customer loyalty, respectively. Thus, our empirical test provides evidence for the appropriateness of the decomposition of online customer value. The relationships among value (value components), satisfaction, and loyalty are demonstrated. Hence the results represent an important step forward in unravelling the intricate relationship between these three key constructs. These findings lend support to the assumptions that customer value includes both outcome and process components in e-commerce contexts. While a number of studies have examined the dimensions of customer value in consumer behaviour literature [9], this study is one of the few attempts to delineate the dimensions of customer value in online shopping contexts. The results provide evidences that while the outcome component is traditionally recognized as the most significant dimension in explaining customer satisfaction, the process component also has a significant impact on satisfaction, and therefore should not be ignored in marketing strategy development. Further, our results demonstrate that process value had an almost equally significant impact on satisfaction compared to outcome value, and is even more prominent in shaping customer loyalty in online shopping contexts. Thus the delineation of these outcome and process dimensions has both academic and managerial significance. Next, the relationships among value-satisfaction-loyalty were supported in this study, which confirm earlier conceptual work of Liljander [81], and Spreng et al. [63]. We originally assumed that outcome value and process value would simultaneously affect satisfaction and loyalty. However, the results seem inconsistent with our hypotheses. The linkage between outcome value and loyalty was fully mediated by satisfaction, while process not. These results reveal that although satisfaction significantly predicts loyalty, it is not the only determinant of loyalty. Customer value may also affect loyalty directly. Inclusion of the value construct in such models provides a richer portrayal of the dynamics surrounding satisfaction evaluations and intentions. Further, contrary to our prediction, outcome value did not affect loyalty significantly. One reason could be that most of our subjects’ products are standard and small ticket products. It is therefore reasonable to measure outcome value in terms of monetary savings (price). However, price alone does not seem to be a good mechanism to build online loyalty if we assume customers are price seeker when buying standard product. Consequently, the outcome value does not seem to affect the loyalty. However, we acknowledge that including other products in the test may produce different results. Further, the results regarding the roles of shopping enjoyment seem inconsistent with our hypotheses. More specifically, the hypothesized linkage between outcome value and enjoyment was not supported, and enjoyment did not lead to customer satisfaction and loyalty. One possible explanation might again due to the products involved in the purchase. We find a large portion of our subjects bought less “hedonic” products, such as phone card. It is less likely to expect consumers to enjoy the shopping process and ‘immersed’ in the environments when they shop for these “utilitarian” products. However, further research is needed to better explore the role of enjoyment in other scenarios. Some serious limitations must be admitted before we discuss the implications. First, we have only a small sample. The generalizability of the result is questionable. Second, the products our subjects bought were standard products to a large degree. A richer variety, or conversely, a strictly controlled product, will surely offer more reliable picture. Our study, therefore, should be treated as an exploratory one on this topic. With these limitations in mind, to the research community, this study (1) provides support for a parsimonious conceptualization of customer value, (2) verifies the theoretical viability of the three-component model, and (3) demonstrates the usefulness of the customer value on the bottom-line of e-commerce performance, and (4) opens a window for future research to find tacit mechanisms to improve customer values. To the practitioners, this study shows that offering process value to customers can be a sharp competition tool. In contrast, mere price competition might win customer’s satisfaction, but not loyalty. However, placing stress on which components of customer value may be contingent on the product type. A wise combination of the values can be an effective online differentiation and competition strategy.