How marketing factors influence online browsing and sales: Evidence from China’s e-commerce market

Abstract

As the e-commerce market evolves from being primarily transactional to being more subtle, sellers now seek to form online strategies. Previous studies have investigated buyers’ purchasing patterns, online transaction trust, electronic word-of-mouth, online resale behavior as well as online auctions. However, less is known about the antecedents that effect store traffic and sales. By using real market data from a major Chinese C2C e-commerce site, this article investigates C2C transactional formation and identifies sellers’ performance payoffs that result from various marketing factors. Marketing factors that influence store traffic and sales will be analyzed by means of the Negative Binomial model and Tobit model. Results point out that strong store reputation and high service quality are crucial indicators for increasing number of browsers and sales amount. In accordance with the results of prior research, advertising is confirmed as an effective tool for positively influencing both store traffic and sales. In addition, we found that guarantee policies can positively impact store sales only by interacting with reputation ratings. Drawing on empirical findings, we also discuss the managerial implications for C2C sellers and put forth some recommendations.