Analysis of E-Consumer Behaviour – Selected Findings from an Analysis of Czech E-Shops and their Customers during the Global Pandemic

Abstract

The study presented in this contribution deals with the issue of using modern methods of data collection for the purposes of analysing consumer behaviour. Professional literature as well as business practice offer us an enormous number of approaches, traditional or innovative, with which it is possible to obtain and then evaluate data in order to understand specific patterns of consumer behaviour. Following on from our previous research in the field, we have applied a method of collecting and evaluating customers e-data in real time. As a source of data, we used the virtual social network Facebook. As a sample we selected customers of the five largest e-shops operated in the Czech Republic. On a sample of more than one and a half million users we monitored the B2C communication of e-shops and subsequently the C2B Facebook interaction of their customers during the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the observed period we analysed hundreds of thousands of interactions and then outlined basic trends and specific characteristics of consumer behaviour suitable for further research. The selected findings resulting from the implemented analyses contribute to the creation of a knowledge base of a qualitative nature, which can help to define research goals in the future process of examining the effects of the pandemic on various aspects of business.

Analysis of Digital Customer Communities in terms of their interactions during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…As noted above, the dominant rate of interactions has shifted from the offline to the online environment. In our previous studies (Dorčák, Štrach & Pollák, 2015;Pollák, Dorčák, 2016;Pollák, Konečný, 2021;Pollák, Markovič, Váchal & Vavrek, 2021), we observe an increased presence of subjects from both side of the market on social networks. It is also possible to state on the basis of our research, that in last decade the e-commerce is increasingly becoming the customer's first choice when buying or selling goods and services.…”

“…Thus, we conclude that the Central European market will also show changed characteristics. Within the studies Pollák & Konečný (2021) as well as Pollák, Markovič, Váchal & Vavrek (2021), we created a reference knowledge base preceding the statistical processing of the dataset. Based on that studies we were able to identify the basic trend lines, which are confirmed in the presented results.…”

“…Given the circumstances, the research was predominantly qualitative in nature, with the main goal being the identification of research topics for further quantitative research. We presented the partial results of the research to the academic community (Pollák, Konečný, 2021), where we intended to specify the topic for further processing through active feedback. Subsequently, we presented the first results of the research for assessment to the international professional public (Pollák, Markovič, Váchal, Vavrek, 2021) and, based on the feedback, proceeded to the finalization of the study being presented.…”

Innovations in the Management of E-Commerce: Analysis of Customer Interactions during the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…At this point, we come directly to the essence of our research efforts over the last fifteen months [10][11][12]43]. We perceive the optimization of processes related to the effective timing of marketing activities of business entities in the context of our research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on e-consumer behavior as key, as the constraints related to the attempts to slow down the pandemic in 2020 (in the form of sudden closure of economies) have caused significant changes in traditional patterns of consumer behavior.…”

“…A considerable part of our research efforts focused on the description of the fundamental parameters of changes and circumstances during the previous fifteen months. From the point of view of scientific research, we focused on the studies by [10][11][12] on the development of an empirical knowledge base for the description of basic changes in the consumer behavior of Central Europeans.…”