Utilitarian and hedonic values of shopping experience in Chinese online C2C market

Abstract

Online consumer-to-consumer (C2C) market is an emerging e-commerce market in China. How to survive and thrive in this attractive but competitive marketplace is a crucial issue for both scholars and practitioners. Many marketing practitioners are convinced that creating compelling online shopping experience is an effective way to attract consumers and sustain companies' long-term competitive advantages. However, there is a lack of systematic studies and empirical evidence on this issue. This study aims to conceptualize online shopping experience and examine both the utilitarian and hedonic values derived from online shopping experience. The utilitarian shopping value puts emphasis on the rational, instrumental, and efficient aspects of online shopping. The hedonic shopping value, by contrast, focuses on the emotional, enjoyable, and entertaining aspects of online shopping. By means of these two focal concepts, this study seeks to develop a conceptual framework based on the experiential consumption theory and the consumer involvement theory. The conceptual framework examines the causal relationships between online shopping values, satisfaction and loyalty as well as the moderating effects of consumer involvement in the relationships between online shopping values and customer satisfaction. An online survey involving the largest Chinese online C2C market - Taobao.com - was conducted to examine the fitness of the proposed conceptual framework. The results of model testing indicate that both utilitarian and hedonic shopping values significantly impact customer satisfaction and loyalty in the Chinese online C2C market. Hedonic shopping value was found to have a stronger effect on satisfaction than utilitarian shopping value. Satisfaction was found to be a full mediator between two types of online shopping values and loyalty. In addition, consumer involvement was found to moderate the positive relationship between utilitarian shopping value and satisfaction. The result showed that for consumers who are less involved in online shopping, utilitarian shopping value leads to greater customer satisfaction than for those who are more involved. However, this study did not report a significant moderating effect of consumer involvement in the relationship between hedonic shopping value and satisfaction. This result suggests that hedonic shopping value plays no different roles in satisfaction between the highly involved consumers and those who are less involved in online shopping. From a practical perspective, the findings suggest that C2C e-service providers should deliver both utilitarian and hedonic shopping values to their customers and make them feel satisfied. The results also indicate the opportunities to provide tailored services to different consumer segments based on their levels of online shopping involvement.