Research On Influencing Factors Of Customer Satisfaction In Catering Online Group-buying

Online group-buying gathers customers with the same needs together through the Internet to purchase large quantities of goods from businesses. In November2008in the U.S., a group-buying website called Groupon was set up and its market value exceeded$1.5billion only in two years, and its business model quickly swept the world. Since March2010, there have been a number of similar websites in China, and there are two kinds of online group-buying including entity group-buying and service group-buying, while the later one is the main form, and the catering is the most popular. Because of the simple business model and easy to copy, the group-buying market in China is a mess, and various violations of customers’interests by websites and businesses are occurred, especially in the catering group-buying. Customers are extremely dissatisfied with it and lose their enthusiasms, so how to improve their satisfaction becomes the focus of attention. From customer satisfaction theory, this paper selects catering online group-buying as the research subject and explores the influencing factors of customer satisfaction.The operational process of catering group-buying is divided into two parts including shopping online and consumption offline. Combined with theories of customer satisfaction, electronic commerce, service quality, influencing factors of customer satisfaction in catering group-buying are chosen, an index system is designed and a model is built. After an empirical study using questionnaires, data are collected from college students and workers with different jobs in Jinan who have experienced catering group-buying. The investigation lasted three weeks, and received the number of355valid questionnaires, the efficient was73.2%.After reliability and validity test, correlation and regression analysis implemented by SPSS17.0, we finally find out the influencing factors of customer satisfaction in catering online group-buying are merchants’ quality of goods and service, after-sales service and protection, environmental quality, information quality, communication services of the website, characteristics of commodity marketing, network payment, website design, and through the satisfaction-importance analysis, we find the former two factors have higher importance but lower satisfaction. At the end of this paper, some suggestions and countermeasures for the development of catering online group-buying are proposed and a further study is planed.