What influences buying leisure services coupons on online group buying?

Abstract

Growing use of IT, laptops, tablets, PC in individuals’ life shaped an opportunity to create online group buying (OGB) as a new online business model. Several of surveys show that OGB is rather popular for selling recreational activities and leisure services, such as restaurant coupons, cinema, spa, concert, flight tickets, museum visits, etc. Therefore, the paper aims to identify and estimate the influences that affect the customers to purchase the leisure services coupons on online group buying. Summarizing the significant findings in scientific literature, we identified six influences, namely price, trust, belonging to virtual community, system quality, information quality and service quality towards customers’ intention to buy the leisure services coupons on group buying sites. The testing of these influences included two stages: focus groups interview and questionnaire. The data was collected from three focus groups and 81 customers - experts using OGB. Inconsistent with previous research results and our proposed hypotheses, the findings of research partly support the appropriateness of suggested influences for understanding customers’ online group buying intentions. Results of the research show that price has the greatest impact on customers’ intention to buy on group buying sites, while other influences have no significant effect. Besides, we identified positive relationships among customers’ group buying experience (positive/negative), customers’ purchase frequency in online group buying and intention to buy on group buying sites in the nearest future. Thus, customers on OGB are very oriented to price and use OGB for cost-saving reason.