Has behavioural loyalty to online supermarkets declined?. Issue 4 (November 2017) - Trinh, Giang Tue
Highlights: Behavioural loyalty declined to online retailers between 2005 and 2009 before remaining stable between 2010 and 2014. Consumers are now shopping from a greater number of online supermarkets and are allocating less of their total spending to each. Supermarket categories are still subscription markets and will grow by increasing the number of consumers who purchase them. Abstract: This paper investigates consumer's behavioural loyalty to online supermarkets over time. We use three measures of behavioural loyalty (share of category requirements, repertoire size, and polarisation index) from four major online supermarkets in the UK across five categories. We find that loyalty to online supermarkets is high in the categories we examined, though it declined somewhat from 2005 to 2009 and subsequently remained stable from 2010 to 2014. We also extensively test the generalisability of the well-known Dirichlet model to the choice of online supermarkets. We find that the model gives better fit from 2010 to 2014 than from 2005 to 2009 and can describe loyalty and competition in this context. Chinese Abstract: 本文调查了一段时间以来消费者对在线超市的行为忠诚度。我们选择了英国的四家大型在线超市的五类商品，采用三种行为忠诚度衡量（同类别下需求份额，储备选择大小和极化指数）。我们发现，在我们检验的类别中，对在线超市的忠诚度很高，尽管从2005年到2009年有所下降，随后在2010年至2014年保持稳定。我们还扩大测试了著名的Dirichlet模型对于在线超市选择的普适性。我们发现，该模型对2010年至2014年的拟合度比2005年到2009年更好，可以描述这种情况下的忠诚度和竞争力。