Study On Customer Value And Competitive Advantage Of E-commerce Website Under Consumer Perspective

As a brand new trade model, e-commerce has been extensively applied and developed in China and has been gradually tending to take place of the traditional ways people shop and become the mainstream of commercial transaction in the society. As Chinese online shopping market grow more and more mature, B2C markets show their advantage on product quality, service assurance, security assurance over C2C markets and have gradually become the first choice of online customers. Since the notion of online customers has been changed from price-centered to service-and-quality-centered, it is inevitable for B2C to take place of C2C and become the mainstream of online shopping. At present, with more and more B2C e-commerce websites emerging in China, the competition among them is getting more and more intense and no website has been able to win absolute competitive advantage. Compared with traditional shopping environment, it’s more difficult for website to establish long-lasting competitive advantage. As a result, how to make profit as soon as possible and gain sustainable competitive advantage have become what e-commerce enterprises concern most in real world.Nature of strategy is competition and competitive advantage essentially lies in the value that enterprises can make for their customers. Since buyers dominate the online shopping market, customers have become the intangible asset which e-commerce websites compete fiercely. As a result, how to satisfy customers’personalized needs and promote users’experience and how to increase their repurchase rate and loyalty and maximize customer value have become the focus of concern of all e-commerce websites. Solving these problems is also the most effective way for websites to make profit as soon as possible, to gain sustainable competitive advantage and solve other problems existing in B2C development. As for e-commerce websites, only when they can gain superior customer value, can they achieve customer satisfactory, customer trust and customer loyalty, and thus gain long-lasing competitive advantage. Therefore, establishing competitive advantage is imperative for them on the premise of providing superior customer value.Scholars at home and abroad have achieved large number of research results on customer value theory, competitive advantage theory, and also some on their relationship. However, the researches on their relationship in the field of e-commerce are rarely seen. Set under this background, the paper started the research of competitive advantage of e-commerce websites from studying customer value. It explored their relationship and tried to find out main influencing factors of competitive advantage through empirical investigation of online shopping users. Then it argued that customer value has significant and positive influence on competitive advantage of e-commerce websites. The paper also studied and evaluated the driving factors of customer value of e-commerce websites, which can instruct their construction and evaluation and provide new ideas and reference for their managers when they work out competitive strategy of the websites.This dissertation consists of one introduction and six parts.Introduction. The disscertation explained the background and significance of the subject, analyzed its research status at home and abroad, put forward research purpose, introduced research object and content, made clear the train of thought, selected research methods, and located research characteristics.Part1:Study on Related Theories. Begin with online customer behavior theory, the thesis defined customer behavior and online customer behavior, concluded purchase behavior model of customers, analyzed their behavior and mental characters, clarified main factors influencing online customers, and analyzed their purchase process. Then three representative theories on customer behavior in the field of e-commerce, namely technology acceptance model, transaction cost theory and customer satisfaction index, were introduced and evaluated. The treatise combined these three theories and revealed the formation of competitive advantage of e-commerce websites. In the following research on competitive advantage theory, the paper discussed the resource of competitive advantage, pointed out that customer value is the new resource, and analyzed the significance of customer value in building enterprise competitive advantage. After the connotation and characters of enterprise competitive advantage were concluded, the disscertation at last studied on customer value theory, put forward a better version of its definition, explain its connotation in detail and summed up five characters of customer value. Through a review and clarification of customer value and its composing dimensions in network environment, the disscertation divided customer value in network environment into two dimensions of utility value and emotional experience value. This part set a foundation of theoretical analysis and empirical research for the following parts.Part2:Model for E-commerce Websites to Form Dynamic Competitive Advantage Based on Customer Innovation. Through a comparison between the traditional strategic logic based on competition orientation and the new logic based on customer value innovation, the disscertation analyzed the significant guiding role that customer value have played in an enterprise’s innovation ability. The paper also analyzed the creating process of customer value including customer value analysis, customer value innovation, and customer value deliver in detail. Through analysis on how customer value affect competitive advantage of e-commerce websites, and vise versa, the disscertation then discussed the interaction between them. Based on the previous analyses, the thesis established a model for e-commerce websites to form dynamic competitive advantage based on customer value orientation, intending to explain its internal mechanism. This model plays a transitional role in this paper.Part3:Effect Research of Customer Value to Competitive Advantage of E-commerce Websites. In this part, the dissertation especially hoped to verify the degree of influence that customer value has upon competitive advantage of e-commerce websites. Using hindcasting, the dissertation first proved significant and positive influence of customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer loyalty involved by customer purchasing behavior psychological perception under electronic commerce environment to e-commerce sites (first step), then demonstrated customer value to customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer loyalty had significant and positive influence (second step), thus indirectly demonstrated customer value to competitive advantage of e-commerce sites has significant and positive influence. The key lies in the demostration of second step. At first, the paper elaborated the theory and related3factors concerned with perceptions of customer purchase behavior in e-commerce environment, which are customer satisfaction, customer trust and customer royalty. Combining this theory with customer value theory and competitive advantage theory the disscertation further analyzed the relationship among customer satisfaction, trust and royalty, the relationship among customer value and customer satisfaction, trust and royalty, and the relationship among the competitive advantage of e-commerce websites and customer satisfaction, trust and royalty. Then the background variable of customer individual characteristic was introduced, the relative hypothesis of relationship among variables was worked out and research model was established. As for the questionnaire used in this part, the thesis first developed the initial scale and questionnaire. After the pre-investigation, the formal questionnaire was formed. In the end, there are altogether297valid questionnaires were collected through sample analyses, descriptive statistic analyses and confirmatory factor analyses of data quality. At last, a structural equation model (SEM) was established, its paths were analyzed and the verification results of the relevant hypothesis were as follows:first, among all the influencing factors of behavior loyalty, customer value is the most influential factor, and then comes the customer satisfaction, followed by attitude loyalty. Customer satisfaction and attitude royalty plays an intermediary role between behavior loyalty and customer value; second, customer value is ranked the most influential among the influencing factors of customer trust, with both direct and indirect influences. Customer satisfaction comes second and plays an intermediary role between customer value and customer trust; third, customer value is ranked the most influential among the influencing factors of attitude loyalty; customer trust comes second and then comes customer satisfaction. Customer trust plays an intermediary role between customer satisfaction and customer trust, and customer value and attitude loyalty; fourth, customers’ individual characteristics have some influence on customer value, customer satisfaction, customer trust and behavior loyalty.Part4:Identification Research on Driving Factors of Customer Value of E-commerce Websites. This part aims to help e-commerce websites to find out which factors customers will pay attention to during their online shopping. First, the disscertation had a review of researches on customer value driving factors and those especially in network environment. Based on the existing research results, the paper stared from perceived benefits and perceived sacrifices, tried to identify the overall customer value driving factors of e-commerce websites and finally concluded five significant dimensions, namely website design character, website service character, production character, transaction cost (including time and energy), and perceived risk. Then analyses of similarity and feasibility of collected factors were carried out through small-scale interviews, and initial list of customer value driving factors was concluded. Next, the disscertation carried out significance analyses on the initial factor set through large sample investigation, and found out the factors that customers didn’t generally pay attention to. At last, the paper investigated the customer of four e-commerce websites, T, J, Z and D. Through the confirmatory factor analyses (CFA), the three dimensions of website design character, production character and website service character and corresponding indexes were proved to be reasonable. With this result, an evaluation index system of competitive advantage of e-commerce websites based on customer value was concluded.Part5:How to Establish Competitive Advantage of E-commerce Websites Based on Customer Value. In this part, the disscertation intended to provide some references to e-commerce websites for making competitive strategy and increasing problem-solving ability. After an introduction and evaluation of the method of establishing competitive advantage, the thesis put forward the corresponding process and carried out empirical deduction of the process as follows:first, do questionnaire surveys on customer perceived value and customer expected value of T, J, Z and D. Use analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to calculate the weight of all the factors of customer perceived values and divided the factors into two groups of high significance and low significance according to the average; second, calculate the competition difference data using analysis of variance, and divide the factors into two group of high difference and low difference; third, calculate the expected value that customers put on each perceived factor, and divide them into two group of high expectation and low expectation according to the average; fourth, establish a three dimensional model of significance, competitive difference and customer expectation according to their separate data, analyze the potential factors and factors of the left four quadrants. Put forward some alternative plans of competitive strategy for each website after an analysis on their competitive advantages and disadvantages.Part6:Conclusion and Prospect. In this part, the disscertation extracted the main points of the whole paper, made a conclusion, pointed out some shortcomings of this research and made prospect of this subject.