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Engaging in webcare, i.e. responding to online reviews, can positively affect consumer attitudes, intentions and behavior. Research is often scarce or inconsistent regarding the effects of specific webcare strategies on business performance. Therefore, this study tests whether and how several webcare strategies affect hotel bookings.

We apply machine learning classifiers to secondary data (webcare messages) to classify webcare variables to be included in a regression analysis looking at the effect of these strategies on hotel bookings while controlling for possible confounds such as seasonality and hotel-specific effects.

The strategies that have a positive effect on bookings are directing reviewers to a private channel, being defensive, offering compensation and having managers sign the response. Webcare strategies to be avoided are apologies, merely asking for more information, inviting customers for another visit and adding informal non-verbal cues. Strategies that do not appear to affect future bookings are expressing gratitude, personalizing and having staff members (rather than managers) sign webcare.

These findings help managers optimize their webcare strategy for better business results and develop automated webcare.

We look into several commonly used and studied webcare strategies that affect actual business outcomes, being that most previous research studies are experimental or look into a very limited set of strategies.

This study aims to take a dual-process perspective and argues that peer influence on increasing impulse buying may also operate automatically. If-then plans, which can automate action control, may, thus, help regulate peer influence. This research extends existing literature explicating the deliberate influence of social norms.

Study 1 (N = 120) obtained causal evidence that forming an implementation intention (i.e. an if-then plan designed to automate action control) reduces peer impact on impulse buying in a laboratory experiment with young adults (students) selecting food items. Study 2 (N = 686) obtained correlational evidence for the role of norms, automaticity and implementation intentions in impulse buying using a large sample of high-school adolescents working on a vignette about clothes-shopping.

If-then plans reduced impulse purchases in the laboratory (Study 1). Both reported deliberation on peer norms and the reported automaticity of shopping with peers predicted impulse buying but an implementation intention to be thriftily reduced these links (Study 2).

This research highlights the role of automatic social processes in problematic consumer behaviour. Promising field studies and neuropsychological experiments are discussed.

Young consumers can gain control over automatic peer influence by using if-then plans, thereby reducing impulse buying.

This research helps understand new precursors of impulse buying in understudied European samples of young consumers.

The purpose of this article is to highlight the relevance of the factors that influence the satisfaction of e-commerce consumers in Romania and Moldova. The study aims to clearly define the main influence factors, so that the marketing managers of the online stores can adopt scientific well-founded decisions.

The paper opted for a study including a large sample of 399 respondents from two countries. For the analysis of the factors influencing the e-commerce satisfaction, multiple linear regression analysis was implemented, and their differentiation within the two countries was highlighted by multivariate analysis of variance.

The research conducted and the results obtained show that there is a differentiation of the factors that influence the level of satisfaction of e-commerce users in Romania and Moldova.

The research is still limited in terms of population studied to only two countries: Romania and Moldova. Although the study is intended to be exhaustive by analyzing no less than 11 factors influencing the satisfaction generated by e-commerce, it is still limited to this group of representative factors. Another limitation has to do with the limited number of demographic variables the authors have included.

Based on the results, the managerial implications for e-commerce companies that want to uniquely address consumers in Romania and Moldova are related to the decisions of marketing and sales managers who must allocate budgets and resources to improve the eight aspects highlighted in the paper. Also, the e-commerce companies should not allocate resources for the implementation of functionalities such as in-app after sales services, the possibility to cancel an order or the live consultant support feature, because these aspects do not influence the satisfaction of e-commerce consumers in Romania and Moldova.

This paper is the first in the scientific literature that implements a comparative study on the influence factors regarding the e-commerce satisfaction in Romania and Moldova. Also, it is important to mention that the present study is an exhaustive one because it includes many influence factors that were analyzed separately in the previous research papers from literature review.