Exploring the dynamic influence of visit behavior on online store sales performance : an empirical investigation

Abstract

The sales performance of online stores plays a critical role in the economy and has attracted increasing attention from scholars. This study focuses on different aspects of the visit behavior of online consumers and explores the dynamic relationships between visit behavior factors and the sales performance of online stores. We adopt comprehensive visit behavior measures, including number of visitors, repeat visits, visit duration, visitor bookmarking behavior, and visitor attributes, and examine whether these metrics are related to sales performance, what the dynamics of the observed relationships are, and which metric is the most important factor in these relationships. We adopt the vector autoregression model with exogenous variables to investigate the dynamic relationships of visit behavior variables with sales performance. We also assess the relative importance of different metrics in explaining sales performance. The findings reveal that visit behavior measures have a strong relationship with sales performance measures. Among the different metrics, the repeat visit metric has the significantly strongest relationship with sales performance, followed by the number of visitors. This study offers new insights for the visit behavior and sales performance literature as well as novel strategies for managers of online stores.