An Exploration of Cross-border E-commerce Consumer Feedbacks: An LDA Approach

Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has become an important channel to help a firm to go into the international market in China. The recent influx in development of CEBC has caused a simultaneous influx in accumulation of text data such as consumer feedback. To better understand consumer feedback, we collected data from a leading CBEC firm in China to explore the topics of feedback posted directly by their customers. We employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to explore the potential topics focused on most by consumers. We found 35 primary topics are mentioned by both sellers and buyers. For the seller’s perspective, we found that the topics such as commission, product audit, communication between seller and buyer, order management and traffic are most important. On the buyer’s side, we found that return and refund, product tracking, product description, shipping time, and seller performance are the most mentioned topics. This study will help contribute to the understanding of how consumer feedback will help firms in many ways, including but not limited to recovering service and product failures, audit internal functions, and improve product quality

The Spatial Agenda Karlsruhe

The Karlsruhe Spatial Agenda is a comprehensive plan for the entire city (Fig. 1) and its future spatial development, jointly developed and supported by citizens, select committees and administration. It wasadopted by the council at the end of 2016 and thereby gained binding status. The Spatial Agenda defines parameters for future planning decisions and provides guidance for planning practice. It covers the range from abstract visions to specific plans. Administration and elected members refer to the Spatial Agenda in making objectives and decisions fully transparent

The Politics of Digitised Boundaries in Vhembe District Municipality of South Africa

Abstract: The advent of the fourth industrial revolution witnessed the introduction of digitised boundaries in local municipalities of South Africa. Digitised boundaries are simply imagined lines between spaces. In many rural local municipalities of South Africa, digitised boundaries define territorial bounds as well as people’s identities within the bounded spaces. Several villages in Vhembe District Municipality experienced spatial changes as a result of the introduction of digitised boundaries as recommended by the National Demarcation Board. The introduction of these digitised boundaries engendered widespread protests as community residents raised their dissatisfaction with the new development. In their minds, the ‘new’ Boundaries (digitised) undermined their social base through exclusion from access to services from ‘their’ local municipalities, and thus infringed their rights to belonging. The aim of this paper unravels the politics of digitised boundaries using a case study of Vuwani Village in Vhembe District Municipality of South Africa. The paper (1) highlights the perceptions of community residents of digitised boundaries; (2) characterises the impact(s) of digitised boundaries on community residents; (3) proposes sustainable strategies for managing complexities from digitisation of boundaries in villages from below. This research adopted the mixed methods approach that enables layering methods and methodologies in data collection and analysis. A.

The Effects of Personalized Recommendations with Popularity Information on Sales - A Field Study in Grocery Retailing

In consumer and information systems research, it remains unclear how consumers consider smartphone app recommendations in the course of their decision making process that leads to product choices in the physical store. Moreover, it is unclear which type of information smartphone apps should transport to consumers and if there are any customer segmentation criteria for smartphone app design. With respect to the theoretical and managerial importance of recommendation services in the form of smartphone apps we want to shed some light on this topic. Combining literature from the fields of IS and marketing research, we hypothesize that personalized recommendations via smartphone apps can help to boost sales in physical grocery stores. Furthermore, we hypothesize that additional popularity information (in the form of “stars”) does not amplify the positive effect of personalized recommendations. In addition, we assume that the effects of recommendation usage differ for men and women. We conducted a field study with a European grocery retailer to test our hypotheses. Finally, we discuss first implications as well as central limitations of our research and present the next research steps

Spartan Daily April 15, 2013

Volume 140, Issue 37https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1404/thumbnail.jp

Electronic word of mouth in online social networks: strategies for coping with opportunities and challenges

In today's world, the widespread success of the Internet, social media, and online social networks (OSN) provide the basis for electronic word of mouth (EWOM). EWOM can be seen as a digital enhancement of traditional word of mouth that makes communication more efficient and involves less effort by its users. The resulting speed of diffusion and information transparency have caused transformative changes in consumer behaviour in all types of markets, which requires the development of new business strategies for adequately dealing with the new circumstances. This doctoral dissertation is divided into three overall subject areas that concern the investigation of capable strategies for coping with the emerged opportunities and challenges of EWOM in OSN. The first subject area concerns negative electronic word of mouth in OSN and investigates capable countermeasure strategies for firms to adequately address claims of unsatisfied customers. For this, three simulation studies are conducted in which the propagation of a negative message and its countering by a positive message published by the firm are numerically analysed. The results reveal that, in general, the persuasiveness of a firm's response is more important than a quick response with a less persuasive counter-message. To some extent, this also holds if the number of OSN members who initially disseminate the counter-message on behalf of the firm is increased. In the second subject area, an optimisation model for individualised pricing is developed for an online store whose customers are interconnected in an OSN and can share price information via EWOM. The model is solved numerically by artificial intelligence solution methods. The results indicate that personalised prices can be financially worthwhile even under price transparency. The third subject area investigates market entry strategies for social media apps and services that are advertised in an OSN for acquiring new users and examines the role of EWOM in this context. A diffusion model is developed and analysed numerically by simulation. Three different targeting approaches are compared to each other regarding their ability to reach a high share of active users in the OSN: (1) a random marketing strategy, where randomly chosen members in the OSN are presented the advertisement, (2) cluster marketing, where whole clusters of members who are densely connected to each other are simultaneously shown the advertisement, and (3) influencer marketing, where the most influential users in the OSN are selected to share sponsored posts about the app in the OSN. The results suggest that EWOM can have detrimental effects if OSN members are too early informed about the app or service. If the information about the app reaches clusters in the OSN prematurely where a sufficient level of activity is not present yet, it can deplete the excitement of the users. The lack of excitement, in turn, can significantly reduce the effect of subsequent marketing campaigns. However, if applied appropriately, a higher level of EWOM about the app or service can increase the performance of the random marketing strategy to the extent that it outperforms cluster and influencer marketing

One Good Tweet Deserves Another: Essays on Firm Response to Positive Word of Mouth through Social Media

abstract: In two thematically related chapters, I explore the benefits incurred as companies actively respond to consumers who share positive word of mouth in digital environments (eWOM). This research takes a multi-method approach by first addressing the psychological impact of company response on the sharing consumer, followed by an examination of real behavioral consequences in a social media setting. Across six studies in Chapter 1, I find support for a conceptual model indicating that consumers who receive a company response to their positive eWOM experience greater satisfaction compared to no response, leading to increased intentions to engage in future positive eWOM on behalf of the company, both through social media and online review websites. Furthermore, I find that consumer perceptions of response personalization lead to judgments of company effort and that these two elements mediate the effect of response on consumer satisfaction. In Chapter 2, using a dataset of firm responses to positive consumer feedback on Twitter (tweets) from 79 apparel retailers, I find that company responses to positive consumer tweets can generate consumer engagement behavior in the form of continued interaction. Company responses that use consumer-oriented language increase the likelihood of consumer interactivity. However, this effectiveness depends on whether the consumer's audience is the company or their broader network of followers. I also show that, in some conditions, companies achieve higher consumer engagement by personalizing responses with the consumer's name. Together, the findings from these two chapters point to the need for companies to strategically practice positive eWOM management, both to promote consumer engagement behaviors and to avoid the negative outcomes associated with unresponsiveness.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Business Administration 201

Spartan Daily, October 3, 2013

Volume 141, Issue 16https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/1435/thumbnail.jp

Engaging your customers via responding to online product reviews

Given the tremendous impact of online reviews on consumer choice, responding to online word of mouth (WOM) has become an important channel for firms to engage the consumers. This thesis investigates how firms can proactively respond to online product reviews to engage customers and manage customer relationships. In Study One, based upon the data of hotel reviews on Tripadvisor.com, I propose that responding by firms differ in three aspects, namely frequency, speed, and the amount of information, and these metrics exert significant influence on subsequent consumes’ WOM engagement, hotel rankings, and votes of usefulness of the reviews. Moreover, in contrast to responding to positive reviews, responding to negative reviews greatly affects consumption decisions given the negativity bias among consumers. Thus, the subsequent two studies examine whether responding help to alleviate the detrimental impact of negative reviews. Drawing from the literature on crisis management, service failure recovery, Study Two posits that sellers’ responses to negative WOM can be categorized as defensive and accommodative. Further, whether accommodative or defensive responding is more effective depends upon the nature of NWOM, namely regular NWOM or product failure. Based on the results of a between-subject experiment, Study Two provides evidence for the asymmetric impact of accommodative versus defensive responding. When confronting regular NWOM, defensive response outperforms accommodative response or no response, whereas accommodative response is superior to defensive response or no response when coping with a service failure. Further, based on the attribution of negative reviews, a moderated mediation effect is found. To enhance the external validity and robustness of these findings, Study Three provides econometric evidence that the relative effectiveness of accommodative vs defensive response on subsequent consumers’ evaluation of their consumption experience. Upon analyzing the hotels’ responses on Tripadvisor.com, responding can be a double-edged sword in that it works only when seller takes the appropriate responding strategies. In particular, the higher proportion of accommodative responses (defensive responses) for product failure reviews (regular negative reviews), the higher the subsequent consumers’ satisfaction. However, responding can backfire when the proportion of defensive responses (accommodative responses) for product failure (regular negative reviews) is high. To recapitulate, this thesis identifies whether and how online responding influences consumer experiences on social media. These research findings can help firms formulate effective responding strategies to take advantage of social media’s unique ability to engage customers and improve consumer satisfaction and loyalty