The Influences of Consumer-to-Consumer Interaction on Dissatisfactory Consumers’ Repetitive Purchases in Network Communities

Shuiping Ding,Jie Lin,Zhenyu Zhang

doi:10.3390/su13020869

Shuiping Ding, Jie Lin + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su13020869

Copy DOI

Abstract

Consumer-to-consumer interaction is an important activity in network communities. Consumer-to-consumer interaction involves information interaction and social interaction, which greatly influences consumers’ experience and behaviors. The model of stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) is usually applied to explain how environmental stimulus affects consumer behavior through the internal state. Thus, this research takes dissatisfactory consumers as the object, sets information interaction and social interaction as a stimulus, consumer knowledge and trust as an organism, and repetitive purchases as a response. It constructs a theoretical model that consumer-to-consumer interaction influences repetitive purchases through consumer knowledge and trust. In this study, the model and hypotheses were tested by analyzing 328 valid questionnaires. The results show that information interaction had a significant positive effect on consumer knowledge, while social interaction had no significant effect on consumer knowledge. Information interaction and social interaction each had significant positive effects on consumer trust. Consumer knowledge and trust each had significant positive effects on repetitive purchases. Consumer knowledge and trust played a partial mediating role between information interaction and repetitive purchase, respectively. Consumer knowledge had no mediating role between social interaction and repetitive purchases, while consumer trust played a complete mediating role between social interaction and repetitive purchases. The results revealed that the deep mechanism of consumer-to-consumer interaction’s influence on dissatisfactory consumers’ repetitive purchases in network communities further enriched consumers’ purchase behaviors, at least theoretically. This research also provided insights for network community marketing.

Highlights

With the rapid development of the social environment and network technology, the network community characterized by information networking and interactive participation is booming
The links of the questionnaire were sent to these network communities that investigation team members and their friends have joined in WeChat, and users were invited to fill in the questionnaires
The covariance-based structural equation model (SEM) was selected for several reasons

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of the social environment and network technology, the network community characterized by information networking and interactive participation is booming. Many persons with common interests, similar experiences, and consistent emotions gather in the network community to generate and share a large amount of content. The network community is an efficient tool for information exchange and social communication [1]. Persons often discuss common topics, communicate emotions, and form a network of interpersonal relationship in network communities, and they maintain a high degree of interpersonal communication [2]. User interaction is important activity in network communities, and information sharing and emotional communication are major content areas of user interaction [3]. Users participate in interaction to meet their needs for information and emotion. Many of the users who use network communities are consumers

Methods

Results

Conclusion