Building a customer base in the electronic marketplace: an empirical exploration of the e‐tailing industry

Abstract

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -Building a customer base as an outcome of customer satisfaction has not been investigated empirically in e-tailing industry. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature. Design/methodology/approach -Explores the relationship between satisfying customers and building a customer base using data envelopment analysis (DEA). Data from the e-retailing industry related to the input variables (e.g. customers' ratings on a set of e-store attributes) and output variables (e.g. a proxy measure of "customer base") are analyzed. Findings -Performance scores for developing a customer base vary across product categories. Performance score is a good parameter for predicting future change on a unique number of visitors and on the competition pattern for a particular e-tailer. Research limitations/implications -Further study can examine other drivers of a developing customer base (e.g. advertising, trust building, and strategic alliance) -thereby producing more robust evidence for customer base development in e-tailing industry. Practical implications -Good practices in the generation of customers and page view have been identified. Knowing the efficiency patterns of an etailer makes it possible to guide managerial action by providing a measure of the extent to which different management actions at the e-tailer can lead to higher future customer growth. Managers should realize that customers match realizations and expectations of product/service performance. Originality/value -This study has identified satisfaction as the important driver of developing a customer base. It focuses on improving diagnosis of the performance of e-tailers by assessing reach efficiency and page view efficiency separately.

The investigation on dimensions of e-satisfaction for online shoes retailing

“…Though factors related to website characteristics, such as convenience, assortment, product information, site design and financial security, etc. are often confirmed to be the key determinants (Bansal et al, 2004;Jiang and Talaga, 2006;Szymanski and Hise, 2000), there seems to be lack of consensus on the postpurchase service. For example, in a recent study by Gounaris et al (2010), they find that their measurements for after-sales-service do not emerge in the factor analysis.…”

“…(Oliver, 1980(Oliver, , 1997Szymanski and Henard, 2001). With the fast development of e-commerce, an increasing number of research has been conducted to investigate the determinants of e-service and e-satisfaction (Bansal et al, 2004;Gounaris et al, 2010;Long and McMellon, 2004;Jiang and Talaga, 2006;Szymanski and Hise, 2000;Yang et al, 2003;Zeithaml et al, 2002). Though factors related to website characteristics, such as convenience, assortment, product information, site design and financial security, etc.…”

Leveraging return policy for price premium

“…The familiarity of brand name Jiang and Talaga (2006) Attention The ability of the Website to hold attention Ba and Pavlou (2002) and Kim et al (2008) Trust…”

Customer Concentration Versus Fragmentation and Its Implications in Corporate Risk

“…The strategic value of a good customer profitability analysis has been demonstrated (van Raaij, 2005), also applications in the field of services are relevant (Jiang and Talaga, 2006). The strategic implications of an activity-based cost of customer bases have also been explored (Smith and Dikolli, 1995), while maybe the most prominent work in customer concentration applied to debt contracting has been made by Yang (2017).…”