دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی تجربه خرید آنلاین در بازار خرده فروشی الکترونیکی - امرالد 2018

Abstract

Purpose – While e-commerce has been widely cited as the new marketing frontier, thus necessitating the need to deliver seamless shopping experiences across various online channels to achieve success, very few firms have the well withal to clearly tie customer experience investments to marketing outcomes. Theoretically speaking, the understanding of the drivers and outcomes of online shopping experience especially group behavior is imprecise. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the drivers and outcomes of online shopping experience (OSE). Design/methodology/approach – A combination of netnography and conversation analysis was used on a pool of qualitative data generated from the Facebook page of a leading online retailer that has online presence in 11 African countries. Findings – Two broad categories of OSE under seven drivers and five distinct behavioral outcomes of OSE emerged from the study. The two categories of OSE drivers, though unique, widely fit into the existing frameworks of OSE. The study also indicates that shoppers seize other shoppers’ reviews as a suitable platform to engage in a wide range of behaviors. Research limitations/implications – The main theoretical implications include the following: complaint handling is not only a behavioral construct but also a stimulator/driver of online shopping experience; consumer behavior is stimulated more by cognitive drivers; trust is an outcome of OSE which leads to not only electronic word of mouth but also external response to service failure; and shoppers perceive external response to service failure as the last resort and this last resort can be activated by regrets and poor internal response to service failure. The major limitation of this study is that the proposed conceptual model was not empirically tested. Future research is required to validate the model. Practical implications – The managerial implications of the findings are that in addition to providing superior shopping experience through enhancing the drivers of OSE identified in this study, online retailers must work assiduously to reduce incidents leading to service failures and promptly undertake service recovery actions whenever service failure occurs. Online retailers especially those operating in emerging markets will therefore benefit from their service recovery investments if they proactively install processes that enable them to promptly and satisfactorily recover failed services. Originality/value – This paper contributes to service science research by proposing a unique beliefattitude-intention model of the drivers and outcomes of OSE on a relatively underexplored field. The proposed conceptual model advances the stimulus-organism-response framework, theory of planned behavior, satisfaction theories and shopping behavior literature in several directions.

Conclusion and implications

This study contributes to services science research in several directions. First, the proposed B-A-I framework advances Rose et al.’s (2012) framework through the identification of relational experience which accounts for customer-to-customer interactions as pointed out in other previous shopping experience literature (Klaus, 2013; Gentile et al., 2007). The study also advances the TRA and TPB by evolving belief attributes such as relational experience and shopping enjoyment that not only reflect shoppers’ cognitive evaluation but also encompass shoppers’ emotion, as well as customer-to-customer interactions. Relational experience which comprises customer-to-customer interactions and has also been conceptualized as social presence in the online context reflects the social context and its influence (Klaus, 2013), as well as the extent to which a computer-mediated medium allows users to experience others as being psychologically present (Gefen and Straub, 2003). While relational experience reflects a social driver of experience because of its emergence from a broader social system, shopping enjoyment reflects consumer emotion. Thus, as drivers of OSE which, respectively, reflect customer-to-customer interactions and consumer emotions, the identification of relational experience and shopping enjoyment in the present study furthers the current understanding of the TRA and TPB whose belief factors are dominantly cognitive. The study also contributes to the SOR framework by identifying some unique belief factors that drive the organism component (i.e. OSE). The most notable is complaint handling. Contrary to previous research where customer complaints were conceptualized as a behavioral construct, this study demonstrates that complaint handling drives OSE. By identifying two unique broad categories of the drivers of OSE, this study contributes to the online shopping literature that claims that the drivers of OSE are diverse (Bridges and Florsheim, 2008). While some of the components of these two broad categories of OSE drivers are consistent with previous research findings, this categorization is unique. It not only portrays shopping experience from an emerging market viewpoint but also demonstrates that cognitive factors are by far the most dominant drivers of OSE.