Customers’ Emotional Experience Under Online Group-buying And Its Effect On Product Repurchase And World-of-mouth

The highly developed of electronic commerce has indeed brought many kinds of new shopping way to customer, among them, the Internet based group-buying is one of the most attracting way. Different from the traditional mode of shopping which means individual customer endelight low price through price discount, the online group-buying provides individual customer with even higher price reduce that can only be available to wholesale in the past. To provider, they can receive a big order in the short time, therefore, Internet based group-buying endelighted popular both from customer and provider for its low price and convenience. However, after a short spring, this kind of transaction encounter tough situation: many websites had to run out of business because the low profit they get from product providers; For providers, they also found hard to get customer satisfaction, neither attract group customer to buy more items; For customers, they found the qualities of products they brought from online group-buying varies, some of them complained that they have got unfair treatment from service providers. The specialty of online group-buying and the relatively short time prosperous have attracted attention and interested from scholars. Among all the current researches, most of them are based on customer behavior, such as the effect of amount of current customers and the deadlines of online group-buying items. According to the conceptual model of expectancy disparity, customer’s consumption emotion is influenced by the disparity between expected performance and the perceived performance of service. This model has some correlation with customer’s regret psychology, higher expected performance reflects lower anticipated regret while lower expected performance reflects higher anticipated regret. On contrary, higher perceived performance reflects lower experienced regret while lower perceived performance reflects higher experienced regret. Therefore, the two kinds of customer’s regret psychologies is the outcome of comparing of different options and have different time zone:Anticipated regret happens before consumptions while experienced regret happens after consumptions. Another factor that influences customer’s anticipated regret is perceived risk. Due to the specialty of e-commerce, customer can not perceived the quality of product of service, besides, the low price provided by online group-buying multiplies customer’s perceived rick and further influence their anticipated regret. Therefore, to understand customer’s psychology changing throughout the whole consumption process will help us understand customer’s emotion and behavior reactions, this inverse help product providers gain customer loyalty in the long-term.Although anticipated regret and shopping experience occur in different times, they have some causal: counterfactual thinking. Anticipated regret happens when customer compare two comes from post-decision and anticipated another decision. Shopping experience happens when customer realize other decision’s outcome is better than the post-decision’s outcome. Combined with the concept of expectancy disparity, customer’s emotion reactions such as delightful, satisfaction, dissatisfaction and anger are the outcome of disparity or parity between customer’s anticipated regret and shopping experience. Delight is a higher level of emotion reaction to satisfaction, so to gain customer’s delight reaction after consumption, products or service not only need to meet customer’s basic requirement, they might also give customer positive surprise. Similarly, anger is another higher emotion level than dissatisfaction, it happens when negative outcome overcome customer’s tolerance zone. In most cases, a angry customer has specific reason or target, he/she feel angry because he/she believes current negative outcome is caused by other’s fails. Based on what discussioned above, this paper proposes following four assumptions:H1:Customer who experienced low anticipated regret and low experienced regret usually feels satisfaction. H2:Customer who experienced high anticipated regret and low experienced regret usually feels delightful. H3:Customer who experienced high anticipated regret and high experienced regret usually feels dissatisfaction. H4:Customer who experienced low anticipated regret and high experienced regret usually feels anger.Customer loyalty has been viewed as one of most importance way to gain competitive edge and long-term profit in the fierce marketplace, a loyal customer not only willing to maintain long-term relationship with a company or a brand, but also bring more potential customers through his/her positive world or mouth behavior. With the developing of researches on customer loyalty, scholars today believe a true loyalty comes from both cognitive loyalty and behavior loyalty, which is a true loyalty customer repurchase same products or services and conduct positive world of mouth actively. In the past, customer satisfaction is believed has direct relation with customer loyalty: a satisfied customer was a loyal customer. However, the existence of "satisfaction trap" reflects that satisfaction and loyalty might not necessary correlated, which means a satisfied customer also switch product or service brand. Compared to customer satisfaction, a delightful emotion is a higher emotion level that can evoke customer’s higher commitments to loyalty. Therefore in recent years, scholars have pointed out that a committed way to gain customer loyalty is to delight customer. When discussion customer’s negative emotion influence on loyalty, a dissatisfied customer indeed plans to switch to other product provider or brand, but the some factors may prohibit such intention transfer to actual behavior. For example, the highly switch cost, a monopolized industry as well as a rare product. However, when customer feel angry toward to provider, which may because he/she is treated unfair by provider, this customer’s higher emotion reaction is evoked, a angry customer has strong intention to abandon current brand or provider and conduct negative world of mouth to people surrounding, to do so, he/she gain a way to release negative emotion and also caution others not to choose the same product provider or brand. Based on what discussed above, this paper proposed following two assumptions:H5:under the same low shopping experience level, customer who has higher anticipated regret may has higher positive word-of-mouth and repurchase intention than a customer with lower anticipated. H6:under the same high shopping experience level, customer who has lower anticipated regret may has higher negative word-of-mouth and switch intention than a customer with higher anticipated.To testify those assumptions, this paper uses scenario-simulated method and questionnaire method. Variable measurements contain online group-buying, customer regret, postconsumption emotion, word of mouth and repurchase intention. Using Factor analysis and reliability analysis methods to conduct Exploratory factor analysis while through texting the reliability, validity and degree of fitting to conduct confirmatory factor analysis. The study shows:both low level of anticipated regret and shopping experience have significant influence on customer satisfaction. Both high level of anticipated regret and shopping experience have significant influence on customer dissatisfaction. A combination of high anticipated regret and low shopping experience have significant influence on customer delight. A combination of low anticipated regret and high shopping experience have significant influence on customer anger. At the same time, T-testing outcomes show that when facing the relatively lower level of shopping experience, customer with higher anticipated regret feel more satisfied or delight than customer with lower anticipated regret; When facing the relatively higher level of shopping experience, customer with lower anticipated regret feel more dissatisfied or anger than customer with higher anticipated regret. Other outcomes also show that a delight customer has significantly stronger intention to conduct positive world-or-moth compare to a satisfied customer; A angry customer has significantly stronger intention to conduct negative world of mouth and switch behavior.This article conducts theoretical analysis which confirms customer’s diverse regret psychologies existing among consumers towards purchased products or services, after the activity of online group-buying, different combinations of anticipated regret and shopping experience lead to different post-consumption emotion, and the inconsistency between anticipated regret and shopping experience is more likely, than consistency, to trigger strong emotional reactions of the consumers such as pleasure or anger, which further verifies the different effect of the transition of regret on the world of mouth and repurchase intention. This work provides new insight and perspective to the researcher’s pursuit of customer loyalty. In terms of managerial practice, this article also lends itself to an instructive and helpful reference to enterprise and group-buying websites, in occasions such as group-buying and other marketing-related activities.