A study on repurchase intentions with customer segmentation in the internet shopping mall

Abstract

Identifying customer repurchase intentions is very important for the Internet shopping mall to activate CRM (customer relationship management) in B2C eCommerce. More online firms are turning their interests to CRM as a means of ensuring their survivals in the Internet economy. In this paper, the repurchase intentions are analyzed by using the approach of benefit segmentation. Total of 979 samples, which had already experience of Internet shopping, are analyzed to demonstrate that the degree of repurchase intentions differs from each segmented group. Most of the previous studies on repurchase intentions have done by overlooking to reflecting the customer``s heterogeneity. Most researches have been performed on the basis of the assumption that customers are all affected by some factors with the same degree. Even though researchers reflected each customer``s characteristic, they just combined a variety of demographic, geographic and usage information with it to understand the market. Since each consumer has the uniqueness, the researchers need to consider it for the effectiveness of their marketing. In order to understand the repurchase intentions successfully, in-depth understanding on repurchase intentions is required more than that of the whole market. Therefore, in this paper, a market is divided into a few segmented markets and deep understanding process for the constituents is proceeded by identifying private benefits for which consumers seek from any services. The results show that the different group has a significant difference in the repurchase intentions. Thus the benefit pursuit in using Internet is an effective segmentation variable for the customer segmentation. The results of repurchase intentions can lead to practical recommendations for CRM in B2C eCommerce.