电商不同类型促销对购买行为的长期影响——以亚马逊电子书为例

促销的长期影响在学术界一直备受争议,并且传统研究更多地关注实体企业的促销效果,而对电商平台的促销活动研究较少。为了厘清电商平台的不同促销方式对消费者购买行为的长期影响,本文基于亚马逊电子书的销售数据,建立固定效应模型考察了降价和优惠券两种价格促销的长期影响。结果表明,降价促销会导致消费者未来购买数量减少、购买金额增加、购买时间间隔缩短;优惠券促销则会使得消费者未来购买数量增加、购买金额减少、购买时间间隔不变。在此基础上,本文进一步分析了消费者购买经验的调节作用。本文不仅丰富了已有促销长期影响的研究成果,而且对电商如何制定促销策略以优化促销长期效果提供了科学可行的建议,具有重要的理论意义和实践价值。

The Long-Term Effect of Different E-commerce Promotions on Purchase Behavior:Taking Amazon E-books for Example

The long-term influence of promotion has long been controversial in academia.Some researchers found that promotions could cause negative effects on purchase behavior in the long run but others came to different conclusions,which may be caused by the variance in the research methods such as experiments and questionnaires,or the diversity of the research objects such as perishable food and storable daily goods.In fact,as far as these previous researches are concerned,the lack of realistic sales data and relying on laboratory studies or surveys may result in inaccurate conclusions.Meanwhile,mainly taking daily necessities as research objects would limit the application of the findings to non-essentials.Besides,traditional researches are more focused on the promotion effect of entity enterprises,whereas the promotions of e-commerce platforms have received insufficient attention.To fill up the research gap and clarify the long-term influence that different promotional methods of the e-commerce platform have on consumer purchase behavior,this paper uses the sales data of e-books from Amazon,and establishes panel fixed-effect regression models to compare the long-term effect of markdown and electronic coupons.The results show that markdown would lead to the decrease of future purchase quantity,the increase of future purchase expenditure,and the reduction of future purchase interval;electronic coupons would lead to the increase of future purchase quantity,the decrease of future purchase expenditure and the invariance of future purchase interval.The results support the hypotheses under the perspective of self-perception theory instead of learning theory,which may be relevant with the fact that e-books are more of high-involvement and preference-related products,so consumers would reflect on their own purchase experience rather than focusing on object product knowledge to make future purchase decisions.On this basis,this paper further analyzes the moderating effect of consumer purchase experience.For the consumers who have made a purchase under the markdown,the more purchase experience they have,the smaller the decrease of future purchase quantity would be;the more purchase experience they have,the larger the increase of future purchase expenditure would be;however,the reduction of future purchase interval would not change as purchase experience varies.Besides,for the consumers who have made a purchase using the electronic coupon,the more purchase experience they have,the larger the increase of future purchase quantity would be;the more purchase experience they have,the smaller the decrease of future purchase expenditure would be;and the future purchase interval would not change as purchase experience varies.This research contributes to understanding the difference between the long-term influence of markdown and coupon of the e-commerce platform,which not only helps extend previous research context,but also adds to existing research findings by examining the moderating effect of consumer purchase experience.According to the research conclusions,this paper puts forward pertinent and practical suggestions.For one thing,to boost future sales profit,the e-commerce platform should employ markdown method instead of distributing electronic coupons.For another,to pump up future sales volume,the e-commerce platform should adopt electronic coupons rather than markdown for promotion.It is noteworthy that this research still has certain inadequacies.Firstly,due to the accessibility of sales data,the research findings are totally based on the e-books,and whether the product category plays a moderating role in the long-term impact of online promotions still needs more investigations.Secondly,as far as the measurement of long-term promotional effect is concerned,this research simply considers the influence of last promotional purchase on current purchase behavior for convenience,not taking all previous promotional purchase experience into consideration which may underestimate the long-term promotional influence.Thirdly,to examine the respective effect of these two promotional methods,this paper simply chooses whether the purchase is accompanied with a promotional offer as the independent variable,rather than making analysis from the perspective of exact price discount,which can be further explored in future researches.