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Online purchaser segmentation and promotion strategy selection: evidence from Chinese E-commerce market

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Abstract

Online customer segmentation is a significant research topic of customer relationship management. Previous literatures mainly studied the differences between non-purchasers and purchasers, lacking further segmentation of online purchasers. There is still existing significant heterogeneity within purchaser-groups. This paper focuses on Chinese online purchaser segmentation based on large volume of real transaction data on Taobao.com, we firstly extracted and investigated Chinese online purchaser behavior indicators and classified them into six types by cluster analysis, these six categories are: economical purchasers, active-star purchasers, direct purchasers, high-loyalty purchasers, risk-averse purchasers and credibility-first purchasers; then we built an empirical model to estimate the sensitivity of each type of online purchasers to three mainstream promotion strategies (discount, advertising and word-of-mouth), and found that economical purchasers are the most sensitive to discount promotion; direct purchasers are the most sensitive to advertising promotion; active-star purchasers are the most sensitive to word-of-mouth promotion; finally, the implications of online purchaser classification for marketing strategies were discussed.

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Acknowledgements

This research is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 71202115 and 71172199, Foundation of Dean of Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences under Grant Y15101QY00, and Postdoctoral Science Foundation under Grant 2011M500434.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Management, University of Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing, 100190, China

    Ying Liu, Hong Li, Geng Peng & Benfu Lv

  2. Alibaba Group Research Center, Beijing, 100025, China

    Chong Zhang

Authors
  1. Ying Liu
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  2. Hong Li
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  3. Geng Peng
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  4. Benfu Lv
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  5. Chong Zhang
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Correspondence to Benfu Lv.

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Liu, Y., Li, H., Peng, G. et al. Online purchaser segmentation and promotion strategy selection: evidence from Chinese E-commerce market. Ann Oper Res 233, 263–279 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10479-013-1443-z

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