Research On Customer Stickiness And Influencing Factors Of B2C E-commerce Platform

The Internet has brought us into an era of mixed consumption.Customer loyalty is declining and the market is becoming more fragmented.For many domestic shopping platforms,the "three-step" strategy of acquiring traffic,realizing traffic,and retaining traffic have entered the third step--the key decisive stage of customer retention.While,in the context of fierce and homogeneous competition,the conversion costs of customers have been reduced unprecedentedly.Many customers' access to and use of the shopping platform is only one-time,temporary,and lack of motivation for continuous participation.From the perspective of customers,what are the characteristics of their relationship with the platform in the face of multi-platform choice? What drives customers to "stick" to a platform? How do these factors affect the relationship between them and further help the platform "stick" customers? These problems are also the key problems to be solved in theory and practice.First,through a systematic review of the relevant domestic and foreign literature on "Stickiness",this thesis argues that it is more appropriate to use the concept of "customer stickiness" to describe the relationship between customers and platforms in the context of fierce homogenized competition in the e-commerce industry,and we distinguish it from the concept connotation and extension of "customer loyalty".Second,through in-depth interviews,we find eight influencing factors of customer stickiness.And finally,based on SOR theory,we combine the U&G and Flow theory,and we try to explain the impact process of the above stimulus on customer stickiness from two perspectives of " gratification seeking" and "process experiencing".The empirical analysis results show that the functional convenience of the B2 C e-commerce platform,e-commerce platform reputation and telepresence have a positive impact on purchase stickiness;e-commerce platform reputation,personalized recommendation,telepresence,game interaction and KOL recommendation have a positive impact on access stickiness.The main contributions of this thesis are as follows:(1)We clarify the concept of "customer stickiness",and further develop the corresponding measurement scale.We find that "customer stickiness" contains two dimensions of "access stickiness" and "purchase stickiness".(2)Based on the SOR theory,we reveal the formation mechanism of customer stickiness.That is,on the basis of 8 stimulating factors(S)of customer stickiness discovered by exploratory research,we explore the psychological process of organism(O)based on the theory of U&G and Flow theory,then reveal their influence on customer stickiness(R).(3)We find that the e-commerce platform's acquisition of "customer stickiness" is no longer simply guided by the logic of "competition" but more emphasis on the logic of "synergy",which indicates that the platform and merchants should work together to build high-quality e-commerce platform reputation.(4)The impact of the B2 C e-commerce platform "KOL recommendation" on customer stickiness does not follow the "IMC" theory completely,which indicates that "KOL recommendation" conducted by the platform and merchants through multiple channels only promote access stickiness but not affect the customer's purchase stickiness.