The Influences of Consumer-to-Consumer Interaction on Dissatisfactory Consumers’ Repetitive Purchases in Network Communities

Abstract

Consumer-to-consumer interaction is an important activity in network communities. Consumer-to-consumer interaction involves information interaction and social interaction, which greatly influences consumers’ experience and behaviors. The model of stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) is usually applied to explain how environmental stimulus affects consumer behavior through the internal state. Thus, this research takes dissatisfactory consumers as the object, sets information interaction and social interaction as a stimulus, consumer knowledge and trust as an organism, and repetitive purchases as a response. It constructs a theoretical model that consumer-to-consumer interaction influences repetitive purchases through consumer knowledge and trust. In this study, the model and hypotheses were tested by analyzing 328 valid questionnaires. The results show that information interaction had a significant positive effect on consumer knowledge, while social interaction had no significant effect on consumer knowledge. Information interaction and social interaction each had significant positive effects on consumer trust. Consumer knowledge and trust each had significant positive effects on repetitive purchases. Consumer knowledge and trust played a partial mediating role between information interaction and repetitive purchase, respectively. Consumer knowledge had no mediating role between social interaction and repetitive purchases, while consumer trust played a complete mediating role between social interaction and repetitive purchases. The results revealed that the deep mechanism of consumer-to-consumer interaction’s influence on dissatisfactory consumers’ repetitive purchases in network communities further enriched consumers’ purchase behaviors, at least theoretically. This research also provided insights for network community marketing.