Private Sales Clubs: A 21st Century Distribution Channel

Abstract

Private sales clubs are a novel service institution arising out of the Internet's ability to allow an exclusively online channel to distribute out of season or out of fashion inventories to a large set of customers. They have become a thriving industry in the 21 st century. In this paper we enhance understanding of this technology mediated institution as a distribution channel. Furthermore, we show how to measure the impact of the distribution services it provides through the Internet on customer satisfaction and of the latter on economic performance. We rely on the technique of quantile regressions in this endeavor. The latter allows for asymmetries in the response function that have been noted as a major issue to be addressed in the analysis of both customer satisfaction and economic performance variables. Our most important empirical finding is that the distortions introduced by ignoring asymmetries in the response function with respect to customer satisfaction are extremely misleading for managers of private sales clubs.

Reviewing the Online Tourism Value Chain

“…Even though the attractiveness of a website has less weight in reflecting latent quality than utilitarian dimensions in our research, its valuation by users has a positive influence on the results of the tourism company both in satisfaction and the brand repurchase intentions. It matches the results obtained by Ali et al (2016) and Ozturk et al (2016), and is in line with Betancourt et al (2017) for online private sales clubs, where the attractiveness of the design had an influence on loyalty for the most-satisfied group of customers.…”

“…First approaches used indirect measurements such as the website design (García and Garrido 2013), a utilitarian attribute that leads back to visual appeal , the level of sociability perceived by users (Barnes and Vidgen 2014) and more recently, the perceived flow (Ali 2016), defined as the development of a pleasant experience, and validated as a mediator variable between utilitarian quality and satisfaction, not as a dimension of website quality. There is a parallelism of these website indicators with the e-store or e-channel attributes identified in other online contexts of study (Ganesh et al 2010;Betancourt et al 2017). Nevertheless, the hedonic elements might have increased their importance for digital consumers.…”

“…In addition, it increases the probability of positive recommendations (Oliver 2010). In several research contexts of online distribution channels, it has been shown that greater satisfaction leads to greater intentions of repeated purchases (e.g., Finn et al 2009;Chiu et al 2014;Betancourt et al 2017). Within the context of online tourism, the study of this relationship is a more recent concern, and the results are not conclusive.…”

“…www.mdpi.com/journal/admsci consumer chooses a certain e-provider, the process leads to a second phase of co-production that, when completed, results in a certain satisfaction level (e.g., Kim et al 2011;Hung et al 2014) or dissatisfaction (Amin and Nasharuddin 2013), and ultimately in some degree of loyalty in terms of intention to repurchase or in actual repetition behaviour (e.g., Ali et al 2012;Ryu et al 2012;Betancourt et al 2017). There is some relevant research integrating the search-purchase-consumption process regarding the traditional service sector channels (e.g., Grewal et al 1998;Olsen 2002;Darsono and Junaedi 2006;Helgesen et al 2010;Ho et al 2017).…”

Impact of Network Channel on Organizational Performance through Radio Frequency Identification; Mediating role of Competition

“…People do not too much caring to physically see these products before to purchase. So, they require the different type of information during the purchasing decision of online and offline products (Betancourt et al, 2017).…”