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Analysis of launch strategy in cross-border e-Commerce market via topic modeling of consumer reviews

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Abstract

Spurred by the policy of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, Chinese e-Commerce companies have found great opportunities in selling goods overseas. The cross-border e-Commerce shares similarities of launch and marketing strategies with domestic e-Commerce, but also has substantial differences. How to make strategic adjustments to better adapt to the overseas market is of great concern to cross-border e-Commerce companies. Analyzing behaviors of overseas consumers could offer an effective way to address this issue and has attracted great interest of researchers. Consumer comments, cheap and abundant by its nature, provides an easy access for analysis of consumer behaviors. In this paper, we focus on consumer reviews of a specific product, the cellphones, and apply topic modeling techniques to investigate the differences between behaviors of domestic and overseas consumers. We find that consumers from domestic and overseas focus on different aspects of product. In addition, the foreign consumers care more about product quality and tend to make description of technique details. On the contrary, domestic buyers pay more attention on consumer services and intend to comment in generalities. All these findings could help e-Commerce companies design better launch strategies in cross-border e-Commerce market.

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Notes

  1. A data sample and related codes can be found in https://github.com/ffair/e-Commerce-analysis.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China, China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (No. 2017M18304), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities and the Research Funds of Renmin University of China (No. 18XNLG02), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 71771211). This work described in this paper was partial supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. 11507817).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Applied Statistics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Feifei Wang & Yang Li

  2. School of Statistics, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Feifei Wang & Yang Li

  3. School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Peking University, Beijing, China

    Yang Yang

  4. Department of Management Sciences, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong, China

    Geoffrey K. F. Tso

  5. Statistical Consulting Center, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China

    Feifei Wang & Yang Li

Authors
  1. Feifei Wang
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  2. Yang Yang
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  3. Geoffrey K. F. Tso
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  4. Yang Li
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Correspondence to Yang Li.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Detailed information of topics

See Tables 7 and 8.

Table 7 The extracted topics and example words from reviews on the domestic platform. All Chinese words are translated into English
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Table 8 The extracted topics and example words from reviews on the overseas platform
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Appendix 2: Selection results regarding six topic categories

We consider different variable selection methods. The results regarding six topic categories are shown in the following table. It is clearly that, the topic categories selected by Lasso are the overlaps of all methods, implying the stability of these selected topic categories. Therefore, we focus on the results of Lasso in this work (see Table 9).

Table 9 Selection results regarding six topic categories under different selection methods
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Wang, F., Yang, Y., Tso, G.K.F. et al. Analysis of launch strategy in cross-border e-Commerce market via topic modeling of consumer reviews. Electron Commer Res 19, 863–884 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10660-019-09368-1

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