Retail Agglomeration Enterprise Purchasing Behavior, Customer Satisfaction Research

With changes of consumers' lifestyle in mo dern society, China's economy growth and WTO entry, retail agglomerations have been growing rapidly in recent years. For a retail agglomeration, investigating consumer purchase behavior is the basis to pursue profits and gain competitive advantages, which are not deeply explored until now. In this thesis, the agglomeration is considered as a whole and consumer purchase behavior is introduced into the frame of consumer satisfaction (CS), based on relationship marketing thought which proposes an organization would gain long-term competitive advantages through customer satisfaction, customer loyalty, and the resulting repeated purchase. The objective here is to identify the antecedents of CS in a retail agglomeration, and to investigate their effects on overall satisfaction about consumer purchase.Firstly, previous studies about the antecedents of CS are summarized, and those in the context of retail agglomeration are identified as desire-disconfirmation model, perceived performance, affect, and search effort and perceived performance difference deriving from consumer search. Furthermore, perceived quality and perceived quality-price ration are used as perceived performance metrics. Secondly, the interrelationship between different antecedents and the impact of each on CS is explored, a conceptual model is developed which integrates the desire-disconfirmation model and affect for the first time, and the corresponding hypotheses are proposed. Thirdly, via Structural Equation Model, the empirical analysis is implemented by using data from 217 customers of 4 homogenous clothes agglomeration in Xi'an. The findings indicate that (l)desire disconfirmation, perceived performance and affect, except search effort and perceived performance difference, have significant effects on CS and reveal strong explanatory power for CS, which result in a good model development; (2) perceived quality and perceived quality-price ration not only are good metrics of perceived performance, but can explain CS much better in the natural shopping setting, which points out the limitation of previous researches and suggests a feasible improvement way; (3) desire-disconfirmation model, which was only applied and tested in the experimental setting, could be used in the context of natural shopping; and (4) perceived performance has a strong effect on both positive and negative affect while desire disconfirmation only significantly influences the former, which reveals affect is a direct...