Online communities and offline sales: considerations on visiting behavior dimensions and online community types
Industrial Management & Data Systems
ISSN: 0263-5577
Article publication date: 17 May 2022
Issue publication date: 21 June 2022
Abstract
Purpose
As an increasingly popular tool for product exploration, online communities have an important impact on consumers’ purchasing decisions. The purpose of this study is to gain a deeper understanding of how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ offline purchasing behavior. The moderating role of two dimensions of consumer visiting behaviors (visiting depth and visiting breadth) also receives attention. Moreover, the impact of consumer visiting behaviors on offline sales for different types of online communities is also the focus of this paper.
Design/methodology/approach
To test the empirical model, the authors collected data on consumers’ visits to an online real estate platform with local housing sales data. In addition to the baseline regression analysis of the data with the help of Stata 17.0, the study also analyzes the robustness of the results through several methods.
Findings
The authors focus on an online community for newly-built housing and find that consumer visits to the focal online community have a positive impact on offline sales. Visiting breadth has a negative moderating effect on this relationship, and no statistically significant moderating effect is found for visiting depth. Further, our empirical exploration finds that consumer visits to competitive online communities have a positive impact on offline focal product sales, but visits to complementary online communities have no statistically significant effect on offline sales.
Originality/value
Our findings contribute to the understanding of consumers’ cross-channel purchasing behavior and provide new insights into how visiting behaviors in online communities affect consumers’ purchasing decisions.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This research was supported by the Major Project of National Social Science Fund of China [grant number 21&ZD119], the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation [grant number LQ21G020003], the Zhejiang Provincial Philosophy and Social Sciences Leading Talent Cultivation Project [grant number 21QNYC14ZD], and the Project of Key Research Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences at Universities-Modern Business Research Center of Zhejiang Gongshang University [grant number 2020SMYJ03ZC].
Citation
Sun, Y., Zhong, Y. and Li, Q. (2022), "Online communities and offline sales: considerations on visiting behavior dimensions and online community types", Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 122 No. 7, pp. 1620-1644. https://doi.org/10.1108/IMDS-01-2022-0033
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2022, Emerald Publishing Limited