Journal of Theoretical and Applied Electronic Commerce Research

Web 2.0 technology enables customers to share electronic word of mouth (eWOM) about their experiences. eWOM offers great market insights to the organization, and important for organization’s success. eWOM monitoring and management is one of the major contemporary challenges for the organization, because of high volume and frequency of the content. It is nearly impossible for an organization to manually monitor content generated by each user. In this paper, we propose sentiment analysis as an alternative method for analysis of emotions and behavioral intentions in real-time data. Sentiment analysis is performed on women’s e-clothing reviews collected from the Kaggle data repository. The dataset consists of 23,486 reviews, comprising ten feature variables. This study applied artificial neural network techniques to determine polarity of the data in terms of positive or negative. Sentiment analysis was performed by using two artificial neural networks, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), to classify the review as recommended (positive) or not recommended (negative). The proposed models have been evaluated on these performance measuring parameters: accuracy, recall, specificity, F1-score and roc-curve. The LSTM method outperformed CNN and achieved classification accuracy of 91.69%, specificity 92.81%, sensitivity 76.95%, and 56.67% F1-score. Based on results of this study, LSTM technique is highly recommended for the sentiment analysis of unstructured text-based user-generated content. Full article

Financial innovation and advances in payment systems are important not only to boost remittances but also to foster the successful development of electronic businesses around the world. As such, many leading companies in electronic commerce are putting a great deal of effort into the development of their payment system to attract more users and compete with other leading companies in the market. WeChat is a social communication tool that introduced a payment function widely adopted as a third-party payment in China nowadays. The purpose of this study was to adopt WeChat as a case study to identify the influential factors that impact consumers’ intention to adopt it as digital payment. We identified several core influential factors including service quality, perceived risk, perceived security, perceived ease of use, social influence, compatibility, and age. Qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed to investigate how influential factors affect the adoption of this third-party digital payment platform. The results revealed that all identified factors have a significant influence on consumer’s intention to use digital payment, except age. This study also provided useful advice for digital payment improvement and recommendations to enhance digital payment for the success of electronic business operations. The paper provides new insight into the factors influencing consumers’ intention to use mobile digital payment. Full article

This study was set out to chiefly examine the influence of psychological traits—need of achievement (“N of Ach”) and risk-taking propensity (RTP)—on perceived usefulness (PUF) and perceived ease of use (PercEU), as well as their effects on the intention to use e-commerce among rural micro-entrepreneurs. This study exploited the psychological traits theories and the technology acceptance model (TAM) by utilizing samples represented by rural micro-entrepreneurs. The results of the study found that the N of Ach and RTP significantly influence PUF and PercEU. The two original TAM constructs and PercEU have significant relationships with PUF and intention. At the same time, it was also found that there exists a significant relationship between PUF and intention. This study therefore serves to fill the gaps where N of Ach and RTP of rural micro-entrepreneurs are seldom tested to examine the effects of perceptions of benefits and ease of use on the adoption of e-commerce. On top of that, this study provides vital input to policy makers and stakeholders of rural development in their efforts to increase the adoption of e-commerce among rural micro-entrepreneurs. Full article

The concept of value co-creation brings about changes in tourists’ roles from value receivers to producers. Most existing studies take value co-creation behavior as a single dimension, ignoring the role switching of tourists. Starting from the precise constitution of value co-creation behavior, this paper, utilizing the method of structural equation modeling (SEM), discusses the mechanism of the effects of tourist participation behavior and citizenship behavior on destination loyalty through each sub-dimension of perceived value. The results showed the following: (1) The participation behavior (in-role) and citizenship behavior (extra-role) of tourists affect different value dimensions. (2) The value co-created by tourists presents a hierarchical state from the primary to the higher level. Among the types of value, novelty and social value belong to the primary level while quality, economic, knowledge, and emotional value belong to the higher level. (3) Destination loyalty is driven not only by tourist behavior (in-role) but also by citizenship behavior (extra-role). Based on the perspective of role switching, this paper establishes the theoretical framework of role switching in the era of value co-creation and proposes some strategic suggestions for marketing transformation. Full article

Recently, the showroom model has developed fast for allowing consumers to evaluate a product offline and then buy it online. This paper aims at exploring the optimal information acquisition strategy and its incentive contracts in an e-commerce supply chain with two competing e-tailers and an offline showroom. Based on signaling game theory, we build a mathematical model by considering the impact of experience service and competition intensity on consumers’ demand. We find that, on the one hand, information acquisition promotes supply chain members to obtain demand information directly or indirectly, which leads to forecast revenue. On the other hand, information acquisition promotes supply chain members to distort optimal decisions, which results in signal cost. The optimal information acquisition strategy depends on the joint impact of forecast revenue, signal cost and demand forecast cost. Notably, in some conditions, the offline showroom will not acquire demand information even when its cost is equal to zero. We also design two different information acquisition incentive contracts to obtain Pareto improvement for all supply chain members. Full article

With the explosive growth of information and the increase of people’s fragmented time, the knowledge payment industry’s market size is growing. However, the heterogeneity between online knowledge payment behavior and traditional consumption gradually comes to the fore. It is of great practical significance to analyze the factors influencing users’ online knowledge payment behavior and clarify users’ online knowledge payment mechanism. Based on UTAUT theory, this study uses statistics, structural equation modeling, and mediating effect analysis to construct a theoretical model of the influencing factors of users’ payment behavior of knowledge payment platform from the user level, knowledge-provider level, and platform level. The findings show that content quality, peer influence, KOL influence, perceived interaction, effort expectation, and perceived trust significantly affect users’ willingness-to-pay and have an indirect effect on users’ paying behavior through their willingness-to-pay. Perceived cost, perceived interaction, content quality, peer influence, performance expectation, and effort expectation directly and significantly affect user paying behavior. By regulating the above elements, the improvement of customer attraction ability of online knowledge platforms can be realized. Full article

In recent years, the study of online consumption behavior has gradually formed its research system and analysis model based on the inheritance of traditional research paradigms, focusing on the inner mechanism of consumption models explained by consumption activities. Online consumption is based on the research scenario of social e-commerce and forms a broad research network through the extension of consumer objects, consumer psychology, and consumer concepts. Although the theoretical constructs of online consumer behavior continue to improve, the relevant studies still do not fully grasp the research frontiers due to the lagging research nature. In the context of Web 2.0, it is impossible to run through the latest developments in online consumption research. Moreover, the study of online consumer behavior has shown a trend of diversification and multiple schools of thought, and a research jungle has emerged, which in essence is the perfection and new height of the study of consumerism. This paper analyses the origins, frontiers, and prospects of online consumer behavior research to clarify the formation principles, development paths, and future directions of the online consumer behavior research jungle. Ultimately based on the economic changes in the post-pandemic context, this paper integrates and proposes an evolving mechanism for studying online consumption behavior, intending to achieve a peek into and reveal the jungle of online consumption research. Full article

In online purchasing, customers may return products due to dissatisfaction with the quality of the product, and receive a refund based on the return policy, which is determined by online distributors. Online distributors can offer generous policies to attract more customers, but at the cost of reducing total profits. In this paper, the effect of the pricing and quality of complementary products (products sold together with other items) in online selling under the return policy is investigated. For this purpose, a mathematical model is developed to obtain optimal values for selling price, refund amount, and quality of products. Based on analytical results, a solution algorithm is proposed to solve the numerical examples and perform sensitivity analysis. Findings reveal that, while increasing the sensitivity of demand with respect to the refund amount, the price, quality, and refund on returned products should be increased. In addition, the online distributor should increase the quality of products when customers are more sensitive to the quality of products. Among other results, the selling price is shown to be negatively affected by demand elasticity with respect to price. In this situation, the online distributor should reduce the quality level and the refund amount for returned products to avoid a sharp decline in profit. In addition, when the quality cost is high, the price and quality should be decreased and the refund amount unchanged. Full article

The spread of social networks and the high level of penetration of digital content and mobile devices have created a society in which consumers expect constant communication from companies. In addition, communication on social media is often accompanied by the hope of being able to interact on an equal footing. In this way, companies hope that the use of social networks will not only increase sales, but also increase attention, brand page traffic, and customer loyalty. The purpose of this study was to provide the grounds for identifying the correlations between the interactive potential of social media based on dialogue-oriented communication and the quality of relationships with online customers. To achieve this goal, an online questionnaire was used in which 604 respondents from Romania participated (204 social media managers and 400 online customers). The results of the study showed that it is particularly important for companies to understand the role of interactive communication in social media and to thus build a bridge between the orientation of communication towards dialogue and relationships with online customers. It was found that the correct use of social networks could also support the achievement of public relation (PR) objectives. In addition, this study has implications for the development of customer-oriented online communication strategies by Romanian companies. Full article

To maintain the sustainable development of a platform’s economy, e-commerce platforms put forward various subsidy programs to retailers selling on them during COVID-19. This paper investigates an e-commerce platform’s decision on subsidizing a retailer selling on it with logistics constraints during an epidemic scenario, with a focus on the role of power structure and altruistic preference. By constructing two Stackelberg game models, the research obtains the optimal subsidy under two power structures (i.e., the dominant platform and the weaker platform), respectively. The comparison between them shows that the conditions of the dominant platform giving subsidies (both altruistic preference and logistics constraints should be higher enough) are stricter than the weaker platform. Considering the same altruistic preference and logistics constraints, the optimal subsidy provided by the weaker platform should always be not less than the dominant platform. However, the weaker platform, surprisingly, can get more utility by lowering its altruistic preference voluntarily when the commission fee is low. No matter what the power structure is, the optimal subsidy increases with the logistics service coefficient and altruistic preference, and the dominant member’s profit/utility is not less than the weaker one, which confirms “the first mover advantage”. Finally, more managerial implications to the platform-retailer systems are discussed. Full article

Electronic marketing (eM) is a flourishing phenomenon that is gaining intense concern because of a significant impact on organizational performance. Over the past few decades, the relevance of eM has been observed in numerous fields (e.g., consumers, organizational strategy, advertisement, and overall philosophy of management to understand the insights globally). To effectively maneuver the field, all stakeholders, particularly academicians and practitioners, must comprehend the current position of the eM theory and practices for dynamic utilization. A systematic bibliometric analysis can serve this issue by providing a holistic view of the publication trend and its trajectory in terms of various themes, including citations and publication metrics. This study analyzes the bibliometric data from 2000 to 2019 to reveal the most productive countries, universities, authors, journals, and prolific publications in electronic marketing. To this end, VOS viewer software was used to visualize the mapping based on co-citation, bibliographic coupling (BC), and co-occurrence (CC). The primary addition of this research is to provide an overview of eM tendencies and paths that may help researchers know the tendencies and future research directions worldwide. Full article

The nature of e-commerce prevents the perception of the intrinsic and sensory attributes of wine. In the virtual environment, visual cues allow consumers to perceive the product, determine their attitude and form a preference. Users will choose one product or another based on the visual appeal of the advertisements they have seen. Wine marketers must consider the importance of the advertisement elements and attract the consumer’s attention. Optimizing the elements included in these messages can help capture consumers’ attention and achieve a higher click-through rate on the ads. The main objective of this work is to analyse the awareness that different advertisements achieve. Specifically, we use a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design where we manipulate the packaging format (single bottle vs. pack), labelling (bottle without label vs. labelled bottle) for wine ads (white and red). To analyse attention, we used an eye-tracking methodology. The main results suggest that attention is captured more quickly with an individual bottle without a label than with a particular bottle with a label in Google ads. However, ads showing packs of bottles with labels get more attention than ads using packs of bottles without labels. Full article

We investigated whether adding product information in mobile commerce improved consumers’ attitudes toward a product and whether this relationship was moderated by consumption goals. We conducted two field experiments in which we recruited parents in Korea and the USA and asked them how they evaluated two childcare hybrid products (HPs) newly developed by Samsung Electronics designers. The results revealed that participants exposed to additional information about the HPs evaluated them more favorably than those who were not exposed. However, this relationship disappeared when a consumption goal was activated. Our findings establish a dynamic relationship between information seeking and consumption goals, asking designers to rethink their rule of thumb in the mobile commerce context. Full article

This study is focused on communications that come from consumer-to-consumer (C2C) ecommerce relationships. This topic is directly associated with the electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) phenomenon. eWOM is related to the set of positive or negative opinions made by potential, actual, or former customers about a seller. The present study proposes a structural equation modeling with partial least squares (PLS-SEM) research model to analyze consumers’ opinions impact on attitude toward purchasing. This model is based on the Information Adoption Model (IAM) in combination with an ecommerce satisfaction perspective, comprising five constructs: (1) service quality, (2) ecommerce satisfaction, (3) argument quality, (4) source credibility and (5) purchase intention. The model was tested by applying the Smart Partial Least Squares (SmartPLS) software for which 116 effective data from customers of the Taobao C2C platform were used. The findings reveal that all of the defined relationships were supported, confirming the positive impact of all the proposed constructs on the purchase intention. In this respect, the findings suggest that C2C platforms should strengthen the analyzed connections to grow the business and to promote transactions. Finally, implications and limitations related to the explanatory capacity and the sample are identified. Full article

Traditional user research methods are challenged for the decision-making in product design and improvement with the updating speed becoming faster, considering limited survey scopes, insufficient samples, and time-consuming processes. This paper proposes a novel approach to acquire useful online reviews from E-commerce platforms, build a product evaluation indicator system, and put forward improvement strategies for the product with opinion mining and sentiment analysis with online reviews. The effectiveness of the method is validated by a large number of user reviews for smartphones wherein, with the evaluation indicator system, we can accurately predict the bad review rate for the product with only 9.9% error. And improvement strategies are proposed after processing the whole approach in the case study. The approach can be applied for product evaluation and improvement, especially for the products with needs for iterative design and sailed online with plenty of user reviews. Full article

This paper explores how different self-construals interact with perceived risk and influence tourism consumers’ technology readiness toward tourism mobile apps. The study used 284 tourist participants to show that tourism consumers, regardless of self-construal type, have a negative perception of technology readiness when they perceive a high level of risk. Furthermore, those with independent self-construal have a more positive perception of technology readiness than those with an interdependent self-construal when they perceive a low level of risk. The results also show that technology readiness mediates the relationship between self-construal and use intention toward mobile apps. Based on these results, we proposed the following practical implications. First, companies need to find and lower potential risks that can be perceived in tourism mobile apps. They must also deliver different messages according to consumers’ self-construal. Companies should provide independents with information related to the positive benefits obtained through the mobile app, and interdependents should be provided with information that reduces perceived losses. Full article

For customer collaborative product innovation (CCPI), lead users are powerful enablers of product innovation. Identifying lead users is vital to successfully carrying out CCPI. In this paper, in order to overcome the shortcomings of traditional evaluation methods, a novel intelligent method is proposed to identify lead users efficiently based on the cost-sensitive learning and support vector machine theory. To this end, the characteristics of lead users in CCPI are first analyzed and concluded in-depth. On its basis, considering the sample misidentification cost and identification accuracy rate, an improved cost-sensitive learning support vector machine (ICS-SVM) method for lead user identification in CCPI is further proposed. A real case is provided to illustrate the effectiveness and advantages of the ICS-SVM method on lead user identification in CCPI. The case results show that the ICS-SVM method can effectively identify lead users in CCPI. This work contributes to user innovation literature by proposing a new way of identifying highly valuable lead users and offers a decision support for the efficient user management in CCPI. Full article

Social commerce has become a fiercely competitive environment. Understanding consumers’ purchase intentions can help social commerce platforms retain and attract more consumers. Social capital is one of the primary resources that plays a critical role in facilitating consumers’ purchase intentions in social commerce. Here, complex relationships between different dimensions of social capital are further clarified and its impact on consumers’ purchase intentions are discussed. Based on a survey of 302 social commerce users, this study utilizes an SEM and fsQCA approach to validate the effect of social capital on consumers’ purchase intentions. The SEM results reveal that the effect of structural social capital on consumers’ purchase intentions is fully mediated by relational and cognitive social capital. The fsQCA results confirm the significance of consumers’ social capital as determinants and provide the configurations that can lead to high purchase intentions. Though previous studies have discussed the factors influencing consumers’ purchase intentions, this study takes the first step toward enhancing the understanding of the configurations that link dimensions of social capital to consumers’ purchase intentions in s-commerce using fsQCA approach. Full article

With the acceleration of global economic integration and digital economy, cross-border mobile payment has gained growing attention. On the other hand, as COVID-19 keeps on spreading, the popularization of cross-border mobile payment can lower the risk of infection caused by cash payment of tourists. However, though previous researchers already examined mobile payment users’ behavioral intention from different perspectives, these research findings tend to concentrate on the non-cross-border section of mobile payment. Therefore, the purpose of this research is to examine factors influencing cross-border mobile payment use intention from the user perspective, and combining three theoretical models, chiefly UTAUT2 (extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology), ITM (initial trust model), and TTF (task technology fit). In this research, 786 Chinese with the experience of using cross-border mobile payment while traveling to South Korea are adopted as respondents, and the structural equation model is used to empirically analyze the data of these research samples. The study found that initial trust, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, price value, task technology fit, and initial trust have significant effects on use intention. Research findings of this paper can deepen people’s understanding of users’ intention to use cross-border mobile payment, and provide theoretical support for the development of cross-border mobile payment. Full article