An Empirical Study On The Relationship Of Retail Stock-out And Corporate Reputation

As the end of sale chain, retail business is the bridge between production and consumption. The flourishing retail business has become an essential condition for lasting boom of national economy. Although, at present, Chinese retail business has got roaring development, many problems still exist, especially stock-out. It will lead to sales decline, but also affect the customer satisfaction and loyalty. As an intangible capital, corporate reputation is a comprehensive representation of the behavior and result in the past. Good corporate reputation is the key to get a foothold in the market. Thus, this paper researches the stock-out, and its impact on customer satisfaction & loyalty and corporate reputation, and whether corporate reputation can regulate the negative change of customer satisfaction & loyalty caused by stock-out. At last, this paper aims at providing management reference to the managers in retail business.This paper firstly reviews some theories related to stock-out, corporate reputation, customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. And then carry out the deduction on the base of the existing research, build a research frame and hypothesis, and develop the scale into questionnaire. This research takes the medium and large supermarkets in Dalian as the object of study, and investigates the consumers in Dalian by non-probability sampling. In this research, totally 300 questionnaires have been handed out,285 have been taken back, and among them 270 are effective. After descriptive statistics analysis, factor analysis, correlation analysis, regression analysis and multi-level regression analysis by statistical software SPSS18.0, draw the following conclusion:Stock-out of retail store has a remarkable negative impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty, so is stock-out to corporate reputation. Another conclusion has been got by multi-level regression analysis:good corporate reputation can regulate the negative change of customer satisfaction and loyalty caused by stock-out.