An Empirical Study of Customers’ Purchase Intentions from Australian Group Buying Sites

Abstract

Group buying is a form of e-commerce, but works similar to bulk buying principle, that allows selling of products and services by third party companies through their websites. Based on a survey done by Canstarblue, out of 250 registered group buying sites, Cudo, Groupon, Ourdeal, Living Social and Scoopon are ranked Australia's top five group buying sites. Research suggests that identifying right products and services to be sold as group buying deals can improve sales and profit margins of these group buying sites. However, there is a research gap in understanding what factors influence customers' purchase decisions. Hence, this paper studies different deals offered by the top 5 Australian group buying sites and presents an analysis based on the primary data collected using systematic sampling method from these websites to understand the role of different variables such as discount rate, deal price, product category and time to purchase deals. Findings reveal that customers' intention to purchase products and services are influenced by discount rate and product categories. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge and business community by revealing the influence of different factors that would have bearing towards customers' intention to purchase from group buying sites.