Exploring E-Commerce Big Data and Customer-Perceived Value: An Empirical Study on Chinese Online Customers

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to make good use of the massive amount of online user comment data to explore and analyze the dimensions of customer-perceived value and the importance of each dimension, given the background of China’s huge e-commerce market. We compiled a web crawler program to collect online comment data from online reviews. The crawled data were pre-processed and content analysis were performed. A customer-perceived value dictionary was constructed based on the extraction of frequent terms, literature review, and expert opinions. We re-identified the dimensions of customer-perceived value to include four key dimensions and corresponding subdivisions. Both the rationality and operability of the dimension model of customer-perceived value were validated and applied. Thereafter, the importance of various dimensions and the impacts of customer-perceived value dimensions on customer loyalty were analyzed and discussed. The empirical research results reveal that all four dimensions of customer-perceived value play an important role in customer-perceived value and that the patterns and degrees of the role of each dimension are rather different. Further, only certain parts of the dimensions of customer-perceived value have an impact on customer loyalty, and the degree of the impact differs substantially.