Online-To-Offline (O2O) Commerce: Factors that influence consumers' offline purchase intention through electronic Word-Of-Mouth (WOM)
The rise of electronic commerce has affected the retail industry in Malaysia. Particularly, offline store retailers are having a hard time maintaining their stores due to lack of profit and decreased foot traffic in their offline stores. Some offline retailers struggle to keep their stores running,...
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Format: | Thesis |
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2022
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Summary: | The rise of electronic commerce has affected the retail industry in Malaysia. Particularly, offline store retailers are having a hard time maintaining their stores due to lack of profit and decreased foot traffic in their offline stores. Some offline retailers struggle to keep their stores running, and as a result, they are forced to close them permanently. These unfortunate circumstances have caused mall closures over the past years due to the influx of retail supply and the ongoing digital disruption in the retail industry. Accordingly, this study aims to investigate the new trend of online-to-offline (O2O) commerce in addressing the occupancy rate problem that the Malaysian retail industry is experiencing. O2O commerce is a new trend that focuses on establishing awareness of products and services online while allowing customers to explore and research on different online and offline offerings and eventually visit offline stores to make their final purchase. This approach combines two broad strategies in retail-specific application, namely, multichannel and omnichannel marketing. The O2Ocommercemode combines the Internet and offline mode, in which the Internet is used as the front counter of offline trade. This quantitative research explores the factors influencing consumer acceptance and use of technology throughout the O2O commerce journey, with 301 millennials as its sample. The development of the study framework is based on the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology and the elaboration likelihood mode. Furthermore, electronic word of mouth (eWOM) is used as a mediator to explain the significant relationship amongst variables, with offline purchase intention (OPI) as the dependent variable, thereby shedding light on how eWOM plays a role in the O2O commerce. The study utilises purposive sampling, Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) and Smart PLS software for data analysis. Accordingly, the findings of this research confirm the significance of performance expectancy (PE), effort expectancy (EE), social influence (SI) and hedonic motivation (HM) as the antecedents that influence consumers’ OPI. Furthermore, the effect of eWOM on consumers’ OPI in the context of the O2O commerce is significant. Finally, this study verifies the importance of eWOM as a mediating variable in influencing the relationship between PE, EE, SI and HM towards OPI in the context of the O2O commerce. Moreover, information gathered by consumers through technology has a positive influence on consumers’ OPI. This research provides insights for Malaysian retailers, emphasising the crucial role of online and offline stores in the highly competitive retailing industry today. In sum, findings show that utilising online and offline stores to complement each other is deemed necessary for excellent business sustainability as a whole. |
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