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Who will stay with the brand after posting non-5/5 rating of purchase? An empirical study of online consumer repurchase behavior

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Abstract

Customer retention has been fully examined in marketing research. It has been noticed that satisfied customers do not always retain and customer churn happens repeatedly in an e-Business context. In this paper, we focus on online consumer repurchase behavior on online business to consumer platforms after posting a non-5/5 rating of the purchased product. The non-5/5 rating can be taken as buyer’s self-claimed non-fully satisfaction on shopping experience. We investigate whether online consumers’ self-claimed non-fully satisfied shopping experience of a brand would attenuate their repurchase intention of the same brand, and further, what factors would impact their repurchase frequency and the time interval to the next purchase of this brand. We applied multinomial logit regression and ordinary least square regressions to Amazon review data to test the research hypotheses. We collected more than 241 thousand review records involving over 182 thousand buyers of Amazon beauty products. 44% of these buyers rated below 5, and 19% out of whom had repurchase records. The empirical results showed that consumers’ past shopping experience and the non-5/5 rating level significantly impact the possibility of repurchase intention; consumers’ emotional stability is associated with their repurchase frequency positively; their relationship proneness to a certain brand shortens the time interval to the next purchase of the brand. Managerial implications and future research directions are discussed last.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economics and Management School, Wuhan University, Wuhan, 430072, Hubei, China

    Dan Ke, Heci Zhang & Ning Yu

  2. School of Business, Robert Morris University, Moon Township, PA, 15108, USA

    Yanbin Tu

  3. School of Business, Jianghan University, Wuhan, 430056, Hubei, China

    Yanbin Tu

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Ke, D., Zhang, H., Yu, N. et al. Who will stay with the brand after posting non-5/5 rating of purchase? An empirical study of online consumer repurchase behavior. Inf Syst E-Bus Manage 19, 405–437 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10257-019-00416-9

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