The strategic analysis of online customers repeat purchase intentions

Abstract

Measuring indirect importance of various attributes is a very common task in marketing analysis for which researchers use correlation and regression techniques. We have listed and illustrated some common problems with widely used latent importance measures. A more theoretically sound approach - the Shapley Value decomposition - was applied to a rich data set of US internet stores. The use of store-level data instead of respondent-level data allowed us to reveal the factors, which are powerful in explaining, why some stores have higher rates of willingness to make repeat purchases than the others. By confronting the indirect importance and performance measures for three different internet stores, we have revealed strengths, weaknesses, attributes that the company should bring customers' attention to and attributes that do not require immediate improvement. © 2012 Macmillan Publishers Ltd.