Online Group Buying Research Articles

An Empirical Analysis of Dimensional Trust in Online Group Buying Sites

Building websites that generate adequate perception of ability, integrity, and benevolence dimensions of trust amongst even the first-time visitors is critically important for online group buying (OGB) sites; otherwise, visitors may be reluctant to transact. Current literature suggests that certain website features can induce overall trust perception (TP); however, their impact on specific trust dimensions has received little attention resulting in scholarly and managerial lacunae to precisely diagnose and remedy the problem with TP. To address this knowledge gap, this study first categorizes the trust-inducing features and then explores their impact on the trust dimensions of an OGB website in India. The results indicate differential impact of feature categories on the trust dimensions, thereby revealing new insights into the theory and practice of achieving targeted trust perception in online retail stores. The study describes limitations and offers meaningful scholarly and managerial implications.

Research on Pricing Models and Strategies of Online Group-Buying

In recent years, the Online Group-Buying has entered a state of development in full swing. The particularity of the OGB platform compared with the traditional market determines that its marketing and price setting model must be different from the traditional market. Based on the summary of domestic and foreign scholars’ literature on the pricing and strategy research of group buying business models, this article analyzes various factors affecting group buying prices. Under various assumptions, parameters and variables, through mathematical calculation and analysis, the optimal price and maximum profit for the healthy development of the enterprise are obtained, and how the merchants on the group buying website should adopt corresponding price-setting strategies and profit models to made some suggestions.

Ověření důvěry a spokojenosti zákazníků na českých slevových portálech metodou modelování strukturních rovnic

The topic of this paper is customers' trust and satisfaction with online group buying. The model of customer satisfaction was designed as a synthesis of the Expectation - Confirmation Model (ECM) and the DeLone & McLean IS Success Model. Reputation and perceived size of the online group buying website, system quality, information quality and service quality were factors analysed in the model. Trust was perceived as a predictor of customers' satisfaction. Data from the questionnaires were analysed using structural equation modelling. It was found that reputation and perceived size of the online group buying website have the most important impact on customers' trust and satisfaction.

Co-purchaser Recommendation for Online Group Buying

Online group buying is a burgeoning business model of Internet shopping, in which people with the same merchandise interests form a group and co-purchase goods with favorable prices. The buyer who launches the co-purchase is called the initiator, and other buyers are called the co-purchasers. Although recommending co-purchasers for a target buyer (co-purchase initiator) on the group buying is an interesting problem, existing studies have paid few attention to this topic. Different from the collaborator recommendation that only considers users with high similarity to the target user, co-purchaser recommendation takes both users with high and weak similarity into account, and the recommendation results can achieve high recall and diversity. However, the task turns out to be a challenging problem since it is hard to make a precise recommendation for buyers with weak similarity. To address the problem, we propose the following two methods. In the first one, we directly impose a penalty to the weak similar co-purchasers in the embedding space. To further improve the recommendation performance, in the second one, we smoothly increase the co-occurrence probability of the weak similar co-purchasers by truncated bias walk. Our experimental results on real datasets show that the proposed methods, particularly the latter, can effectively complete the co-purchaser recommendation and has high recommendation performance. In addition, considering that co-purchase may last longer, the total recommendation result can be generated in multiple stages and adjust the current recommendation list based on the feedback from the recommendation of previous stages. It is a trick for all co-purchaser recommendation methods to make the total result better.

Factors affecting satisfaction and loyalty to online group buying

PurposeIn 2008, a phenomenon emerged in online retail that attracted the attention of many people, creating a new virtual model of commerce. This phenomenon was called online group buying and arrived in Brazil in 2010. The purpose of this study was to identify the factors that affect satisfaction and loyalty to group buying sites.Design/methodology/approachThrough structural equation modeling, the relationships between the attractiveness of discount rates, service quality, popularity, online brand image, antecedent word of mouth (WOM), creativity and trust in relation to consumer general satisfaction, declared loyalty, repurchase intention and positive WOM were observed. A total of 727 valid questionnaires were collected from online group buyers to test the 11 hypotheses proposed in this study.FindingsThe main contribution of this study was that it identified the strong influence of service quality, popularity and online brand image on consumer general satisfaction, and the influence of service quality, trust and general satisfaction on repurchase intention. It also identified the influence of trust, creativity and general satisfaction on declared loyalty, and finally, the influence of trust and general satisfaction on positive WOM.Research limitations/implicationsBecause of the extensive and robust model, other statistical interactions among the constructs were gauged. It is possible that new structures and paths for alternative models can be proposed in the future with the inclusion of new relationships not analyzed in the present study. Furthermore, future studies should consider testing the generated model in other countries, as the particular features of collective purchasing in Brazil should be taken into account.Practical implicationsIn addition to being concerned with the attractiveness of discounts, marketing managers of group buying sites should concentrate their efforts on strengthening perceived quality, image, trust and the creativity of the site to ensure customer loyalty.Social implicationsThe online group buying business model that was established in Brazil differs significantly from the American and European models. As many online group buying studies have been conducted in these markets, Brazilian consumers will enjoy substantial gains in the quality of the service provided by collective purchasing sites through the development of actions that focus on improving the factors that affect these consumers.Originality/valueThe originality of this study lies in the development of a single model that tests a set of factors gauged separately in other studies related to online purchase behavior in a broader perspective.

Effects of cue congruence and perceived cue authenticity in online group buying

PurposeThe study investigates how the congruence of online deal popularity and star rating influences service quality expectation in online group buying (OGB) websites. It also investigates the role of authenticity perceptions of online cues.Design/methodology/approachTwo experiments are used to assess the effects of congruence between deal popularity and star rating on service quality expectation for service deals in an OGB website.FindingsThe findings suggest that a combination of congruently high deal popularity and high star rating has a stronger effect on expected service quality than a combination of congruently low cues. The findings further suggest that expected service quality is greater under the combination of high deal popularity and low star rating than the combination of low deal popularity and high star rating, showing the differences between incongruent cue combinations. The findings also show the moderating effect of consumer authenticity perceptions of cues on the expected service quality.Originality/valueThe novel contribution of the study is to extend cue congruence theory to explain how congruent online information cues and the consumers' authenticity perceptions of the cues influence consumers' judgment of online deals. The contribution is validated empirically in the context of OGB. The findings advance current knowledge concerning how consumers use online information cues.

Does Similarity Matter? The Impact of User Similarity on Online Collaborative Shopping

Online group buying is increasingly recognized as an important model of online commerce; however, research examining the antecedents of group buying remains limited. Drawing on the stimulus-organism-response framework and the social exchange theory, this study proposes an integrated model to explore the impact of user similarity on social exchange and group buying behavior in the social commerce context. Using a survey of 233 respondents with group buying experience, we empirically validate the proposed model. The results largely support the proposed hypotheses, and the findings indicate that user similarity (i.e., internal and external similarity) is positively associated with social exchange (i.e., reciprocity, reputation, and trust), which in turn affects consumer group buying behavior. The three social exchange constructs are found to fully mediate the impact of user similarity on group buying behavior. The present study advances theoretical understanding of online consumer collaborative shopping from the perspective of user characteristics and provides some practical implications for vendors, consumers, and platform operators.

How Price Dispersion Influences Intention to Join Online Group Buying: The Role of Perceived Price Fairness

How Price Dispersion Influences Intention to Join Online Group Buying: The Role of Perceived Price Fairness

Investigating the Success of OGB in China: The Influence of Personality Traits

Online group buying (OGB) is one of the latest types of e-commerce to find success in China. Many OGB businesses join the marketplace in China every month, creating tremendous competition. In order to understand the success factors, this study uses information systems success models and incorporates personality traits. We collected data from 408 OGB customers and found support for the model, with most variables being significant. Among the five major personality traits, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness directly impact actual purchase behaviour of Chinese OGB customers whereas neuroticism and openness to experience have no effect.

The Charisma of Online Group-Buying: The Moderating Role of Social Motivation

Group buying can spread worldwide because the growth of the online shopping market has been considerable. In addition to deal popularity and discount rate, social motivation was included in this study. If a consumer cannot achieve an economic exchange benefit, a social exchange benefit might provide another function for the group member to stay in the community. This study adopted convenience sampling and an online questionnaire to conduct a survey. Among 240 questionnaires collected, 204 were valid. According to ANOVA analysis, the results demonstrated that social motivation has a positive influence on the relationship between the discount of a product and customers 'purchasing intention but not on the relationship between the popularity of a product and customers' purchasing intention. Therefore, we concluded that strengthening social networking can have a positive effect on customers' purchasing intention and thus encouraging the development of group purchasing retailers and related industries.

Predicting actual spending in online group buying – An artificial neural network approach

Abstract With the widespread of the Internet and Web 2.0 applications, the way products are being sold has been transformed from the traditional individual purchases to group buying. Popularly known as online group buying or OGB, this new way of selling products has enormous potential for online businesses. Even though various studies have been conducted to examine consumers’ intention to repurchase, revisit or continuance intention however such intentions may not necessarily lead to actual spending. The aim of the study is to identify the factors that drive consumers’ actual spending in OGB. Unlike previous studies which used linear regression models, through the use of the artificial neural network, we successfully identified the linear and nonlinear effects of trust, price consciousness, ease of use, usefulness, gender and Internet time spent on consumers’ actual spending in OGB. The research model predicts with an accuracy of 87.14%. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Consumer perceived value, involvement, trust, susceptibility to interpersonal influence, and intention to participate in online group buying

Postulating consumer involvement as crucial to online group buying, this study deploys consumer perceived value, perceived trust, and susceptibility to interpersonal influence to provide a closer look at consumer intention to participate in online group buying. The results of the proposed model, tested using structural equation modeling on a sample of 553 respondents, show that consumer involvement plays a central role in explaining intention to participate in online group buying. Consumer perceived value, perceived trust, and susceptibility to interpersonal influence all show a significant relationship with consumer involvement. Consumer perceived value also exhibits a strong relationship with perceived trust, which, in turn, exhibits a significant relationship with intention to participate in online group buying. The results furnish significant contributions to the theory and practice of online group buying and retailing. The limitations of the study and implications for future research in online group buying are discussed.

Optimal Multiple Attribute Decision Model for Key Parameters of Online Group Buying Product

The rise of the internet has led to rapid development of online group buying, and with the various functions and analysis tools provided on the internet, consumers are making more purchases than ever before. In addition to attracting consumers to buy products or services via online shopping platforms, the industry’s online group buying market allows customers to enjoy preferential prices together. Consumers can bargain through large-scale purchases. Through quantity-based pricing, the effect of the decline on consumers’ expected price will be enhanced, and consumers will be able to purchase products at lower prices, which encourages more consumers to join group buying schemes. In terms of product cost, online shopping operations enable manufacturers to save shop setup and inventory costs, and some of these cost savings may be reflected in the selling price, which can enable customers to obtain products at lower prices. The grey decision model is used for further in-depth exploration. The purpose of this study is to use the grey correlation ranking and grey multi-attribute decision-making (TOPSIS) process to further determine the optimal shelf-time, inventory quantity, and selling price (key parameters) of commodities, in order to design a plan that makes maximum profit for the industry and provides the best service to customers.

A Qualitative Approach to Understand Consumer Groups and Decision-Making Process in Online Group Buying

This exploratory study used a qualitative approach to segment consumers in an online group buying context based on benefits pursued. 58 participants who have online group buying experience were interviewed. A cluster analysis was conducted on the interview data. The authors found three sub-groups of consumers: economic shoppers, balanced shoppers, and destination shoppers. A hierarchical decision-making process model was developed for different sub-groups of consumers. The results showed that these three sub-groups of consumers are different in terms of their decision-making process. This study overcomes the shortcomings of traditional segmentation studies by proposing a new segmentation method.

Evaluation of intelligent agents in consumer-to-business e-Commerce

Electronic commerce has changed traditional business trading behaviors, since consumers can easily consume through the Internet e-commerce platform. The Internet provides numerous products and services, but consumers find it is hard to choose their favorite ones. The consumer-to-business (C2B) is popular in recent years and it has become one of the best choices for customers forming a group to buy products. Thus, more and more consumers participate in online group buying. However, consumers anticipate to different prices when buying products and demand service. Thus, applying an intelligent agent into negotiation can effectively decrease efforts spent on collecting buyer information, transaction costs, and negotiation with sellers.This study proposed a system that applies an intelligent agent into the C2B e-commerce process, and evaluates the system through an experiment. Additionally, a questionnaire is used to investigate the benefits of the proposed intelligent agent systems. Analytical results show that the proposed intelligent system can increase user satisfaction, reduce performance risk, and raise perceived fairness, but nothing help on perceived value. It implied that the system still needs efforts and time to promote in nowadays commerce. If people can understand its value from finding the information they need, it must grant the more perceived value. Additionally, this system is not only applicable to C2B, but it can extend to other e-commerce models, because the agent can help the negotiation between the sellers and buyers.

Hofstede’s Collectivistic Values and Sustainable Growth of Online Group Buying

This study investigates the moderating effects of consumer personality traits and the mediating effects of social influence susceptibility in consumers on the relationship between individuals’ cultural orientations and intentions toward online group buying (OGB). The Big Five personality dimensions, normative social influence, and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are considered. Because understanding what motivates consumer intentions toward OGB is a major focus of firms and OGB website operators, this study contributes to the topic by identifying consumers’ personality traits and levels of susceptibility to social influences, which impact OGB intentions. Findings in Study 1 reveal that consumer personality traits (e.g., agreeableness) moderate the impact of individual cultural orientations (i.e., collectivism) on intentions toward OGB. Study 2 describes the mediation process of susceptibility to normative social influences on OGB intentions. The findings from this study bridge a literature gap in the context of OGB by demonstrating how OGB site operators can improve marketing strategies, leading to increase sustainable purchase intention. The article concludes with managerial implications by providing insights for online group buying sites and firms, particularly those that target collectivistic cultural markets.

Allocation and pricing of group-buying based on the fixed bidding

Online group-buying is a popular business mode based on Internet. Group-buying websites can get discount for goods or services through promotion and other means which used to gather enough number of people, and sellers can also sell more quantities of goods. However, the existing group-buying mode is that all buyers unify the fixed pricing, the mechanism cannot distinguish the contribution of different buyers and motivate buyers report truthfully. In this paper, an online group-buying pricing method based on buyer’s fixed bidding is proposed in view of the influence of buyer’s bidding price and demand quantity on the participants’ group in the group-buying mechanism. We introduce the concept of relative importance to the allocation and pricing of mechanisms and propose a new mechanism named Fixed bids Truthful Mechanism for Group Buying (FTM4GB) based on correlation importance. At the end of the paper, we prove the economic attributes of individual rationality, incentive compatibility and budget balance.

A pricing method of online group-buying for continuous price function

Group-buying has become a popular commodity trading mode in current business modes. However, the existing unified price of group-buying often determines the price by setting the ladder function according to the final quantities. This method not only ignores the contributions of participants to group-buying, but also leads to the phenomenon of buyers’ false reports. In this paper, a pricing method of online group-buying based on continuous price function is proposed. We adopt an algorithm called Vickrey–Clarke–Groves for group-buying; buyers’ payments are the sum of commodities’ price and the extra amount by purchase quantity. The mechanism motivates buyers to report truthful preference through the compensatory payment. We prove that the mechanism has economic attributes such as incentive compatibility through theoretical proof and simulation experiments.

An equity theory perspective of online group buying

This article presents a purchase equity model for online group buying (OGB) to examine the antecedents and consequences of OGB behavior. The study tests 458 usable responses collected by means of mall-intercept systematic sampling from consumers who had previously participated in OGB against the purchase equity model using structural equation modeling. Drawing from both input constructs (perceived sacrifice and perceived risk) and output constructs (perceived benefit and perceived quality) for equity, the findings support the purchase equity model. The findings show the significance of perceived sacrifice, perceived risk, perceived benefit, and perceived quality on consumer perceptual evaluations of purchase equity in OGB. The results suggest that OGB marketers and site operators should focus on promoting perceived benefits (value for money, good selection of products and services, convenience) and perceived quality (ease of use, aesthetics, prompt processing speed) and implementing measures that reduce consumers’ perceived sacrifice (monetary, time, effort) and perceived risk (security, privacy, purchase redemption, purchase delivery) in OGB.

Factors influencing consumers' purchase intention towards online group buying in Malaysia

Online group buying (OGB) is growing rapidly and it has become popular in many countries. Due to the lack of research and early stage of development in the developing and emerging market, we aim to examine the factors influencing consumers' purchase intention towards online group buying in the Malaysian context. Through intensive literature review on consumers' purchase intention and online group buying, a set of factors are proposed as leading influencers. This paper reveals that perceived usefulness (PU), perceived ease of use (PEOU), price, electronic word of mouth (e-WOM), trust and perceived risk (PR) are the main determinants of online group buying. The three major factors, PU, price and e-WOM, demonstrated relatively strong impact on consumers' purchase intention towards OGB whilst trust and perceived risk shown significant impact and moderate impact respectively on consumers' participation in OGB. Contrarily, PEOU was found to have no influence in Malaysian consumers.