Comparison Of British And Chinese Online Customer Experience On Purchasing Websites

With the development of the Internet, online purchasing has become increasingly popular in contemporary society. Online shopping, however, is no longer a simple shopping behaviour based on the Internet since online consumers perception is developing as well. Accordingly, more and more consumers prefer online shopping as a means of relaxation and recreation. As a result, online customer experience has aroused interest within the fields of electronic business operators and marketing researchers. Creating a unique customer experience on purchasing websites is of significant importance for customer retention of companies. The aim of this research is to critically analyse the different British and Chinese online customer experiences on purchasing websites from the cultural perspective including Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory and consumer culture theory. The highlights of this thesis firstly lies in the proposed framework on the basis of traditional customer experience theories and flow related experience theories, and secondly, this thesis makes a cultural comparison between British and Chinese online customer experience, which cannot be found in the extant literature.The dissertation firstly reviews the extant literature on online customer experience including online flow concepts, experience and experiential marketing, online customer experience, Hofstede’s cultural dimension theory and consumer culture theory. Accordingly, the conceptual framework can be initiated and six hypotheses about whether the sensorial, emotional, cognitive, pragmatic, lifestyle and relational dimensions of online customer experiences are positively related with online customer behaviour, which can be tested with a quantitative research. By applying Likert’s five-point rating scale, both online and face-to-face questionnaire were delivered to both British and Chinese online shoppers by asking their degree of agreement to online purchasing. A total of 217 responses were gathered and imported into the SPSS 21.0 software to run reliability test, t-test and multiple regression tests. The findings in the thesis concluded that only cognitive and lifestyle antecedents of online customer experience have positive relationship with online consumer behaviour for British group; while for Chinese group, online consumer behaviour is positively related to cognitive, emotional and pragmatic antecedents of online customer experience.Cross-cultural analysis of the similarities and differences of British and Chinese online shoppers was carried out separately according to the research findings. Moreover, consumer culture theory was also adopted for explanation when the thesis findings are contradictory with Hofstede’s research findings. Finally, this thesis makes recommendations for e-marketers and web designers from the perspective of cross-culture perspective, and it also identifies contributions, limitations and opportunities for further research.