• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.19 no.1
• /
• pp.147-165
• /
• 2009

Virtual community(VC) will increasingly be organized as commercial enterprises, with the objective of earning an attractive financial return by providing members with valuable resources and environment. For example, Cyworld.com in Korea uses several community services to enable customers of Cyworld to take control of their own value as potential purchasers of products and services. Although initial adoption is important for online network service success, it does not necessarily result in the desired managerial performance unless the initial usage is continuously related to the continuous usage and purchase. Particularly, the customer who receives relevant online services and is well equipped with online network services, will trust the online service provider and perceive less risk and experience more activities such as continuous usage and purchase. Thus, how to promote continued online service usage or, alternatively, how to prevent discontinuance is a critical issue for VC service providers to consider. By aggregating a wide range of information and online environments for customers and providing trust to its members, the service providers of virtual communities help to reduce the perceived risk of continuous usage and purchase. Drill down, online service managers realize that achieving strong and sustained customers who continuously use online service and purchase on it is crucial. Therefore, the research into this online service continuance will identify the relationship between the initial usage and the continuous usage and purchase. The research of continuous usage or post adoption has recently emerged as an important issue in the IS literature. Individuals' information systems(IS) continuous usage decisions are congruent with consumers' repeat purchase decisions. The TAM(Technology Acceptance Model) paradigm has been strongly confirmed across a wide range from product purchase on EC to online service usage contexts. The analysis of IS usage based on TAM has proven to be successful across almost online service contexts. However, most of previous studies have focused on only an area (i.e., VC or EC). Just little research has tried to analyze the relationship between VC and EC. The effect of some factors on user intention, captured through several theories such as TAM, has been demonstrated. Yet, few studies have explored the salient relationships of VC users' EC acceptance. To fill this gap between VC and EC research, this paper attempts to develop a research model that extends the TAM perspective in view of the additional contributions of trust in the service provider and trust in members on some factors that affect EC and VC adoption. In this extension, we applied the TAM-to-TAM(T2T) model, and analyzed the transfer effect of trust between these two TAMs. The research model was empirically tested on the context of a social network service. The model was to extend TAM with the trust concept for the virtual community environment from the perspective of tasks. By building an extended model of TAM and examining the relationships between trust and the existing variables of TAM, it is aimed to explain a user's continuous intention to use VC and purchase on EC. The unit of analysis in this paper is an individual user of a virtual community. The population of interest is the individual with the experiences in virtual community. The data for this paper was made available via a Web survey of VC users. In total, 281 cases were gathered for about one week, but there were some missing values in the sample and there were some inappropriate cases. Thus, only 248 cases were finally analyzed. We chose the structural equation analysis to test the hypotheses and it is better suited for explaining complex relationships than the other methods. In this test, AMOS was used to test the Structural Equation Model (SEM). Noticeable results have been found in the T2T model regarding the factors affecting the intention to use of virtual community and loyalty. Our result showed that trust transfer plays a key role in forming the two adoption beliefs. Overall, this study preliminarily confirms the salience of trust transfer in online service.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.4
• /
• pp.1-17
• /
• 2012

Personalized smart devices such as smartphones and smart pads are widely used. Unlike traditional feature phones, theses smart devices allow users to choose a variety of functions, which support not only daily experiences but also business operations. Actually, there exist a huge number of applications accessible by smart device users in online and mobile application markets. Users can choose apps that fit their own tastes and needs, which is impossible for conventional phone users. With the increase in app demand, the tastes and needs of app users are becoming more diverse. To meet these requirements, numerous apps with diverse functions are being released on the market, which leads to fierce competition. Unlike offline markets, online markets have a limitation in that purchasing decisions should be made without experiencing the items. Therefore, online customers rely more on item-related information that can be seen on the item page in which online markets commonly provide details about each item. Customers can feel confident about the quality of an item through the online information and decide whether to purchase it. The same is true of online app markets. To win the sales competition against other apps that perform similar functions, app developers need to focus on writing app descriptions to attract the attention of customers. If we can measure the effect of app descriptions on sales without regard to the app's price and quality, app descriptions that facilitate the sale of apps can be identified. This study intends to provide such a quantitative result for app developers who want to promote the sales of their apps. For this purpose, we collected app details including the descriptions written in Korean from one of the largest app markets in Korea, and then extracted keywords from the descriptions. Next, the impact of the keywords on sales performance was measured through our econometric model. Through this analysis, we were able to analyze the impact of each keyword itself, apart from that of the design or quality. The keywords, comprised of the attribute and evaluation of each app, are extracted by a morpheme analyzer. Our model with the keywords as its input variables was established to analyze their impact on sales performance. A regression analysis was conducted for each category in which apps are included. This analysis was required because we found the keywords, which are emphasized in app descriptions, different category-by-category. The analysis conducted not only for free apps but also for paid apps showed which keywords have more impact on sales performance for each type of app. In the analysis of paid apps in the education category, keywords such as 'search+easy' and 'words+abundant' showed higher effectiveness. In the same category, free apps whose keywords emphasize the quality of apps showed higher sales performance. One interesting fact is that keywords describing not only the app but also the need for the app have asignificant impact. Language learning apps, regardless of whether they are sold free or paid, showed higher sales performance by including the keywords 'foreign language study+important'. This result shows that motivation for the purchase affected sales. While item reviews are widely researched in online markets, item descriptions are not very actively studied. In the case of the mobile app markets, newly introduced apps may not have many item reviews because of the low quantity sold. In such cases, item descriptions can be regarded more important when customers make a decision about purchasing items. This study is the first trial to quantitatively analyze the relationship between an item description and its impact on sales performance. The results show that our research framework successfully provides a list of the most effective sales key terms with the estimates of their effectiveness. Although this study is performed for a specified type of item (i.e., mobile apps), our model can be applied to almost all of the items traded in online markets.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.18 no.1
• /
• pp.23-38
• /
• 2012

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems. Our experiments use a real dataset acquired from one of the largest internet shopping malls in Korea. We use 66,278 transactions of 3,847 customers conducted during the last two years. Overall results show that the accuracy of association rules of frequent shoppers (whose average duration between orders is relatively short) is higher than that of causal shoppers. In addition we discover that with frequent shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears very high when the co-occurrence criteria of the training set corresponds to the validation set (i.e., target set). It implies that the co-occurrence criteria of frequent shoppers should be set according to the application purpose period. For example, an analyzer should use a day as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to offer a coupon valid only for a day to potential customers who will use the coupon. On the contrary, an analyzer should use a month as a co-occurrence criterion if he/she wants to publish a coupon book that can be used for a month. In the case of causal shoppers, the accuracy of association rules appears to not be affected by the period of the application purposes. The accuracy of the causal shoppers' association rules becomes higher when the longer co-occurrence criterion has been adopted. It implies that an analyzer has to set the co-occurrence criterion for as long as possible, regardless of the application purpose period.

• Management & Information Systems Review
• /
• v.29 no.4
• /
• pp.123-142
• /
• 2010

This study suggest that firms can use online brand communities as an IMC tool to achieve high brand loyalty through marketer-controlled or loyal customer-controlled brand contacts. In this perspective, the online brand community as a marketing communication tool can help the firm in eliciting favorable responses from customers. This study finds that an online brand community, as a critical marketing promotion tool, helps a firm elicit favorable relationship with customers and build strong brand loyalty. In particular, this study suggests several important theoretical and managerial implications. First, this study confirm that "advertising usefulness" is the most powerful and important factor that affects cgerial 's positive emotionomehile "sales promotion usefulness" impacmehin "interactivity" but dies not impacmhin "cgerial iexperience"ltyevent usefulness" impacmehin "cgerial iexperience"but dies not impacmhin "interactivity." In addition, "cgerial iexperience" signifn "itly impacmehin "cgerial -to-cgerial iinteractivity." This indicates that online environment provides participapacmwith a fun and exciting environment. In that sense, enhancing the online brand community experiencemwould be a critical factor for building strong brand. Thi", mword of mouth can play a riclly important role in making many cgerial s to trust brand and to enhance online brand community loyalty. Web users are becoming web authoore owning and creating content limited only by their imaginations.

• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
• /
• v.23 no.1
• /
• pp.3-16
• /
• 2020

Recently, as the fashion e-commerce market has expanded, the proportion of online shops that are growing rapidly has increased and with them so too has competition. Most retailers operating online shops need their own competitiveness, and accordingly, the need to develop their logistics service quality components is increasing. This study investigated the quality of the logistics services, which is a factor of the logistics service quality of the internet shop. It influences customer satisfaction and repurchase intention by collecting samples from the customers using online fashion shops. Two hundred customers who shop online were surveyed to extract the data. The sample was subjected to basic statistical analysis using the SPSS 25.0 package, and factor analysis, t-test, ANOVA, and correlation analysis were performed. The results of this study showed that the information quality of proactive return, promptness of the return process, and reliability of the return cost had a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and it had a significant influence on the customer's repurchase intention to the online store. A selection of shops showed high amounts of return reasons, high customer satisfaction, and high repurchase, whereas, in general, many others scored poorly across these criteria. This suggests that a retailer operating online should consider pages for receiving information plus sales content in addition to the quality and constituent factors of its logistics services for returns that influence repurchase and satisfaction.

• CRM연구
• /
• v.4 no.2
• /
• pp.19-29
• /
• 2011

There is a large difference between purchasing patterns in an online shopping mall and in an offline market. This difference may be caused mainly by the difference in accessibility of online and offline markets. It means that an interval between the initial purchasing decision and its realization appears to be relatively short in an online shopping mall, because a customer can make an order immediately. Because of the short interval between a purchasing decision and its realization, an online shopping mall transaction usually contains fewer items than that of an offline market. In an offline market, customers usually keep some items in mind and buy them all at once a few days after deciding to buy them, instead of buying each item individually and immediately. On the contrary, more than 70% of online shopping mall transactions contain only one item. This statistic implies that traditional data mining techniques cannot be directly applied to online market analysis, because hardly any association rules can survive with an acceptable level of Support because of too many Null Transactions. Most market basket analyses on online shopping mall transactions, therefore, have been performed by expanding the co-occurrence criteria of traditional association rule mining. While the traditional co-occurrence criteria defines items purchased in one transaction as concurrently purchased items, the expanded co-occurrence criteria regards items purchased by a customer during some predefined period (e.g., a day) as concurrently purchased items. In studies using expanded co-occurrence criteria, however, the criteria has been defined arbitrarily by researchers without any theoretical grounds or agreement. The lack of clear grounds of adopting a certain co-occurrence criteria degrades the reliability of the analytical results. Moreover, it is hard to derive new meaningful findings by combining the outcomes of previous individual studies. In this paper, we attempt to compare expanded co-occurrence criteria and propose a guideline for selecting an appropriate one. First of all, we compare the accuracy of association rules discovered according to various co-occurrence criteria. By doing this experiment we expect that we can provide a guideline for selecting appropriate co-occurrence criteria that corresponds to the purpose of the analysis. Additionally, we will perform similar experiments with several groups of customers that are segmented by each customer's average duration between orders. By this experiment, we attempt to discover the relationship between the optimal co-occurrence criteria and the customer's average duration between orders. Finally, by a series of experiments, we expect that we can provide basic guidelines for developing customized recommendation systems.

• Management Science and Financial Engineering
• /
• v.11 no.3
• /
• pp.19-45
• /
• 2005

Collaborative filtering is one of the most common methods that e-commerce sites and Internet information services use to personalize recommendations. Collaborative filtering has the advantage of being able to use even sparse evaluation data to predict preference scores for new products. To date, however, no in-depth investigation has been conducted on how the data sparsity effect in customers' evaluation data affects collaborative filtering-based recommendation performance. In this study, we analyzed the sparsity effect and used a hybrid method based on customers' evaluations and purchases collected from an online bookstore. Results indicated that recommendation performance decreased monotonically as sparsity increased, and that performance was more sensitive to sparsity in evaluation data rather than in purchase data. Results also indicated that the hybrid use of two different types of data (customers' evaluations and purchases) helped to improve the recommendation performance when evaluation data were highly sparse.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Clothing and Textiles
• /
• v.36 no.7
• /
• pp.677-689
• /
• 2012

This research examines the impact of brand personality dimensions on store attitude and store loyalty for department stores. A total of 431 customers participated in the online survey. The participants were women in their 20's to 50's with experience of purchasing apparel from four major department stores. The data were analyzed using factor analysis, reliability test, and structural equation modeling with PASW 18.0 and AMOS 18.0. Analyses revealed three dimensions of the brand personality of department stores: prestige, passion, and sincerity. Among the three dimensions of brand personality, 'passion' and 'sincerity' were shown to be the most influential factors affecting department store attitude. The results suggest that passionate and sincere customers tend to exhibit favorable store attitudes. Customers with more favorable store attitudes then are more likely to express great store loyalty than those with less favorable attitudes. An analysis of the effect of brand personality on attitudes toward department stores provides implications for department store brand management strategies.

• Knowledge Management Research
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.249-269
• /
• 2020

Recently, as the online market has matured, it is facing many problems to prevent the growth. The most common problem is the homogenization of online products, which fails to increase the number of customers any more. Moreover, although the portion of the online market has increased significantly, it now becomes essential to expand offline for further development. In response, many online firms have recently sought to expand their businesses and marketing channels by securing offline spaces that can complement the limitations of online platforms, on top of their existing advantages of online channels. Based on their competitive advantage in terms of analyzing large volumes of customer data utilizing information technologies (e.g., big data and artificial intelligence), they are reinforcing their offline influence as well through this online for offline (O4O) business model. On the other hand, most of the existing research has primarily focused on online to offline (O2O) business model, and there is still a lack of research on O4O business models, which have been actively attempted in various industrial fields in recent years. Since a few of O4O-related studies have been conducted only in an experience marketing setting following a case study method, it is critical to conduct an empirical study on O4O selection attributes and their impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. Therefore, focusing on China's representative O4O business model, 'Fresh Hema,' this study attempts to identify some key selection attributes specialized for O4O services from the customers' viewpoint and examine the impact of these attributes on customer satisfaction and loyalty. The results of the structural equation modeling (SEM) with 300 O4O (Fresh Hema) experienced customers, reveal that, out of seven O4O selection attributes, four (mobile app quality, mobile payment, product quality, and store facilities) have an impact on customer satisfaction, which also leads to customer loyalty (reuse intention, recommendation intention, and brand attachment). This study would help managers in an O4O area well adapt to rapidly changing customer needs and provide them with some guidelines for enhancing both customer satisfaction and loyalty by allocating more resources to more significant selection attributes, rather than less significant ones.

• The Journal of Information Systems
• /
• v.14 no.2
• /
• pp.293-317
• /
• 2005

Female customers form a major customer group for Internet shopping and their trust on Internet stores seems to be significantly related with their transactions. This paper focuses on female customers' trust on Internet stores, hypothesizing that online service quality has a positive impact on trust and that trust, in turn, together with service quality has a positive effect on loyalty. We investigate trust from three dimensions(benevolence, integrity, and ability) and at the same time, unlike existing research, treat service quality to have five dimensions (intangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy) as known in SERVQUAL(Parasuraman et al., 1988). Survey data is obtained from the female college student sample. Our research model is justified in terms of construct validity, internal consistency, and goodness of fit. Research hypotheses are tested using SEM(Structural Equation Modeling). The results are as follows: First, assurance and empathy dimensions of service quality have significant impacts on benevolence/integrity dimension of trust. Second, out of the five service quality dimensions, only assurance has a positive effect on ability dimension of trust. Third, assurance dimension of service quality and ability dimension of trust are positively related with customer loyalty. The most important factors for female customers' loyalty are found to be assurance(service quality) and ability(trust). The significance of assurance is in line with findings from existing research. But its relationship with the trust dimensions is uncovered in this research, and the only dimension that impacts on ability is assurance. We find that female customers build trust about internet stores based on their ability rather than on their benevolence/integrity and that the female customers' perception on the internet stores' ability can be improved by higher service quality from the aspect of assurance. Importantly enough, these findings offer practical guidelines to Internet stores to boost female customers' loyalty.