دانلود رایگان مقاله آیا وفاداری رفتاری به سوپر مارکت های آنلاین کاهش یافته است؟

ABSTRACT

This paper investigates consumer’s behavioural loyalty to online supermarkets over time. We use three measures of behavioural loyalty (share of category requirements, repertoire size, and polarisation index) from four major online supermarkets in the UK across five categories. We find that loyalty to online supermarkets is high in the categories we examined, though it declined somewhat from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently remained stable from 2010 to 2014. We also extensively test the generalisability of the wellknown Dirichlet model to the choice of online supermarkets. We find that the model gives better fit from 2010 to 2014 than from 2005 to 2009 and can describe loyalty and competition in this context.

6. Discussion, limitations and future research

We tested loyalty to online supermarkets using three measures of loyalty. The share of category requirements and repertoire size are common measures of loyalty, but both suffer from a confounding effect with category purchase rate. Our final measure of loyalty, polarisation, is not so affected and so is an excellent measure of loyalty. The first two measures, however, are more intuitively understandable, whereas the third is a measure of the variation in purchase probabilities between brands for the category. Nonetheless, all three measures provide value when understanding loyalty. We are interested in the dynamics of loyalty over time in this is particularly the case. All three of our measures identified two distinct phases in the evolution of loyalty to online supermarkets.

1. Firstly, over the years 2005–2009 all three measures showed a decline in loyalty. Our first measure of loyalty, average SCR, declined between the years 2005 and 2009. This metric decreased from 79% to 62%, a decline of more than 20%. In effect, this measure shows that the volume of sales allocated to each online supermarket for each category declined by 20%. Similarly, over the same span, the average repertoire size increased by more than 12% (from 1.06 to 1.19), showing that the number of online supermarkets used to make category purchases increased. Finally, the polarisation index decreased from 0.95 to 0.82; again, consistent with a decline in loyalty.

2. This decline in loyalty did not continue; between 2010 and 2014 all three loyalty measures stabilised. On average, SCR decreased by only 1% from 70% in 2010 to 69% in 2014. Similarly, repertoire size remained stable after 2010 amongst all five categories, with the average repertoire size remaining unchanged (1.20). And finally, the polarisation index remained stable between 2010 and 2014 increasing by just 3% during the five-year period. Between 2009 and 2010 both repertoire and polarisation were stable while SCR increased by 12% from 62% to 70%.