| To meet the needs of customers is the base for the retail industry to survive.The information technology develops rapidly and people's living standards continue to rise,posing more challenges for the development of the retail industry.According to a study conducted by Accenture and the Ministry of Commerce of China,online retail sales have experienced a slowdown after experiencing a period of rapid growth and physical retail sales have been sluggish due to the impact of online retailing.As a result,the growth of the entire retail industry has been declining.The trend shows that a pure online retail or physical retail model cannot meet the needs of the customer.Personalization,consumer experience and the form of diversity that the customer shows in the shopping process promote the retail industry to integrate the advantages of online channels and traditional physical channels to serve customers better.Under this background,the C&M mode,in which online and offline channels connected closely,came into being.In the C&M retail mode,the customer switches shopping channels freely according to personal preferences,quality of goods and channel service quality,which makes the shopping behavior to be complex and makes it hard to correctly understand and analyse customer needs.Because of retailers' misunderstanding of customers behavior and channel model,a series of channel conflict comes out,such as misclassification of supply and demand between goods and customers,waste of cost,differences of quality of goods among channels,poor quality supervision and other phenomena after another.At present,there are few researches on the customer shopping behavior under the C&M retail model based on the perspective of quality control.Based on the reality,this article will have a profound practical significance for this area.Based on TAM,customer value theory and task-technology matching theory,this dissertation applies the research methods such as questionnaire,empirical analysis,system dynamics,AHP and self-organizing map neural network to analyse dynamic shopping behavior in C&M retail model,in order to find the rule of customers behavior and proposing the corresponding quality control strategy.The main research content can be summarized as the following four aspects:First,the analysis of customers' channels choosing behavior in C&M retail mode.The article divides the customers' shopping behaviors into three stages:pre-purchase,mid-purchase and post-purchase.Based on the TAM model,a model of customers'channel selection behavior in the whole shopping process is established.The online and offline methods were used to conduct questionnaire surveys among customers of C&M retailers.The paper empirically analyse the effect direction and extent of customer,product quality and channel service quality on customer channel selection behavior.Second,the paper takes the matching analysis between product quality and channels.All products have the characters of sensibility,functionality,safety and economy.This paper chooses goods with big quality differences as examples.By using expert advice and AHP,this research assign the quality attributes with different points to analyze the matching degree of various kinds of products and online channel to propose the control strategy in a "quantity" view.Third,simulation analyzing the dynamic behavior of customer's whole shopping process.Through the theory of customer value and system dynamics,this paper establishes customers' shopping behavior system,which could be divided into pre-purchasing,purchasing and after-purchasing three subsystems with causal and effect analyzing respectively.The paper uses the Vensim software to simulate the dynamic changes of main indicators in searching of pre-purchasing,purchasing and post-purchasing three phases,based on the combined context of the matching of different product quality,the preference of customer network and the quality of online service.Fourth,analyzing attention of product quality and sentiment based on comments of customers.The paper uses crawler software Pathon to get customers' reviews of eight categories of products(running by C&M Retailers)from TM,TB,TD,SN and other well-known retail websites in China.Then,doing word segmentation and tagging part-of-speech(POS)in each of comment by ICTCLAS Word segmentation system and Pathon.In addition,using self-organizing map neural network to excavate the quality attributions and sentiment of the customers' concerned on,as well as quantitative analyzing on the attention of quality attributions and sentiment polarity.Furthermore,establishing a quartile graph with the degree of attention and sentiment polarity as indicators,so we put forward the control strategy of the product quality in a "quality" view.Through the analysis of the above content,the article gets the following conclusions:Firstly,according to the empirical results,the characteristic of perceptibility,security and economy characteristic of product quality is significantly related to the choice of online channel in the searching and purchasing stages.In other words,the more easily the product quality can be perceived,the more information customers can search on the websites and the information is more reliable.As a result,customers are more likely to choose online channel.The less the customers need to pay for the maintenance cost as well as cost of the product itself,the more inclined customers are to choose online searching and purchasing.When the products are expensive,or may create security risks,or their manufacturing process and technology is complex,customers will avoid choosing online channel in the searching and purchasing stages.In the post-purchase stage,product quality attributes are not closely related to customer's choice of online channel,indicating that product quality attributes partially affect the choice of online channel.In addition,the channel usefulness is significantly and positively with the online channel in the whole stages of shopping,but the ease-of-use is only significantly and positively with the online channel in the pre-purchase stage,weakly in the other two stages.Secondly,the products of all kinds of quality attributes are assigned different value to quantify the relative matching degree of the goods with various quality attributes and the online channels.This study selects eight categories of goods as test object,which are clothes,books,computers,food,perfumes,medicines,toys and famous brand leather handbags,as these products have obvious differences and high online and offline sales.Experts are invited to rate the quality attributes of all kinds of products,and then the study uses the analytic hierarchy process to measure the influence weight of each quality attribute on customers' choice of online channels.Finally,the matching degree(measured by a scale of one to ten)of the eight types of products and online channels are obtained,which are clothes(4.03),books(9.11),computers(5.51),perfumes(3.13),washers(6.07),medicines(4.72).The higher the matching degree value is,the more suitable the products are to be sold online.This result will guide C&M retailers to allocate the commodity volume between online and offline according to the quality attributes of the products and avoid the channel conflict.Thirdly,through the simulation analysis of the customer's dynamic shopping behavior,it is found that under the different combination of the product quality matching degree,customer network preference and channel service quality,the customers present different behavior rules in the whole shopping process.The study divides the customer dynamic shopping behavior system into three parts:the pre-purchase search subsystem,the purchase subsystem and the post-purchase subsystem.Online search amount,the online purchase amount and the online praise number are the state variables of the three sub-systems respectively.The results of simulation show that the higher the product quality matching degree is,the greater the probability of customers choosing online channels in each stage of shopping becomes.Keeping other conditions remain unchanged,when retailers improve the quality of online services,the probability of customers choosing online channels will be higher,and if the products have lower product quality matching degree,the growth of probability that customers choose online channels to search will be higher.The product quality attributes will affect the purchase transfer rate of customers from online to offline,and the higher the product quality matching degree is,the lower the transfer rate of customers is.When retailers improve online service quality,the purchase transfer rate will gradually decrease.The higher the matching degree of products quality is,the greater the impact of online service quality on customer transfer rate becomes.The higher the product quality matching degree is,the more likely customers to give praise.When the retailer further improves the online service quality,the probability that the customer will give a favorable comment will increase.The higher the quality matching degree is,the more obvious the change of the growth rate of customers' favorable comments is.Fourthly,through mining and analyzing the customer reviews of C&M retailers,the study finds that customers have different focuses and emotional polarity for different quality attributes of products.The results of the quadrified graphs show that the customers are most concerned about the functional qualities of digital goods(such as mobile phones and computers),but the performance of emotional polarity is poor,which belongs to the area that needs improvement.Customers are more concerned about the economic durability of water heater,washing machine and other household appliances,but there is still a gap with the customers' requirements.Customers are most concerned about the appearance quality of the wearing apparel(such as shoes,hats and so on),followed by the functional qualities such as comfort,warmth,sweat absorption and so on.While the emotional polarities of the above two attributes perform better.However,there is still a big improvement area.Such products' poor performance of "security"(whether authentic or not)and "economic"(affordable)belongs to the areas that are in urgent need of improvement.For those products whose hedonic attributes are more prominent,the customers are most concerned about their hedonic function and have higher emotional polarity.And customers pay more attention to appearance quality and "safety,(whether authentic or not),but have poorer emotional polarity which needs prompt improvement.Besides,customers pay less attention to the "economy"(affordable)of such goods and have lower emotional polarity toward,which is also an area that needs improvement.The above findings will provide the basis for retailers and related parties to conduct targeted quality control of various commodities.With the support of the above research contents and conclusions,there are 3 innovative points reflecting as follows in this paper:First of all,this is the first paper to simulate customers shopping behavior dynamically in multi-channels.Through literature reviewing,it is found that the current researches mainly focus on the aspects of theoretical,empirical,statistical clustering analysis and behavior simulation in a single channel,however,there are few researches simulating shopping behaviors dynamically in various retail channels.This paper divides customers' shopping behaviors into three phases which are pre-purchasing,purchasing and after-purchasing to study the whole process of customer shopping behavior systematically.Moreover,the paper firstly considering the quality attributions of products,characteristics of customers and service quality of channel as the influencing factors of customers' behaviors to simulate customer behavior in the overall shopping process.This makes up the deficiencies of current studies in concerning customer behaviors with certain stages or certain factors merely.Meanwhile,it will provide a new idea for the field of researching customer behavior.Secondly,this paper quantifies the matching degree of various quality attributes of goods and channels for the first time.In the retail context of C&M,analyzing the matching degree of products and channels could provide greater profits for customers and retailers effectively.By referring to the existing related literatures,it mainly focuses on the research of quality and the channels of goods respectively,while there is no research studying from the perspective on matchingdegree between goods and channels.This research selects 8 various kinds of quality attributes of commodities as objects,then assigning values to quality attributes of various commodities from the perspective of matching the channelaccording to the expert opinion method and analytic hierarchy process.Meanwhile,stimulating the channel selection behavior in the whole process of customer shopping via system dynamics method so as to analyze the matching degree of the channels with various quality attributes in each shopping phase will provide theoretical reference.This study provides an important support for how to arrange products of different quality attribute rationally between online and offline channels under the C&M mode. |
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