Inoue Yuki, Hashimoto Masataka
Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Hiroshima University, Higashi-senda 1-1-89, Naka-ku, Hiroshima-shi, 730-0053, Japan.
Graduate School of Global Business, Meiji University, 1-1, Surugadai, Kanda, Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo, 101-8301, Japan.
Heliyon. 2022 Feb 2;8(2):e08867. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2022.e08867. eCollection 2022 Feb.
This study analyzed the changes in consumers' use dynamics of general e-commerce (EC) platforms (e.g., Amazon.com) during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. We initially supposed that the significance of consumer benefits, including pricing, product variety, and delivery services, on the platforms would decrease and the value of using an EC platform itself would increase due to the pandemic, based on which we conducted a comparative analysis of questionnaire data from 2,119 Japanese consumers who use general EC platforms. The data were obtained in November 2018 and January 2021. Our analysis has two parts, the first designed as a conjoint analysis to statistically analyze the changes in consumers' sense of values for pricing, variety of goods, stability and quality of delivery services, and basic benefits of using EC platforms; and the second part designed to statistically analyze the changes in comprehensive items when using EC platforms. We categorized the dataset into men and women and further clustered them based on the patterns of consumers' sense of factors when using EC platform. The analysis results were inconsistent with our initial supposition, in that a non-negligible proportion of consumer clusters showed an increase in the significance of factors, including pricing, product variety, and delivery service, and a decrease in the basic benefits of using EC platforms. Regarding the results of the analysis of comprehensive items, the only commonly observed change for most clusters of both men and women was an increase in the use of package drop. The results indicate that changes in consumers' sense of using EC platforms due to the pandemic were not as simple as supposed because the pandemic caused various changes in the need mechanism of consumers of EC platforms.
本研究分析了2019年冠状病毒病（COVID-19）大流行期间消费者对通用电子商务（EC）平台（如亚马逊网站）使用动态的变化。我们最初认为，由于大流行，包括定价、产品种类和配送服务在内的平台上消费者利益的重要性会降低，而使用EC平台本身的价值会增加，基于此，我们对2119名使用通用EC平台的日本消费者的问卷数据进行了比较分析。数据于2018年11月和2021年1月获得。我们的分析分为两部分，第一部分设计为联合分析，以统计分析消费者对定价、商品种类、配送服务的稳定性和质量以及使用EC平台的基本利益的价值观念的变化；第二部分旨在统计分析使用EC平台时综合项目的变化。我们将数据集按性别分类，并根据消费者使用EC平台时的因素感知模式进一步进行聚类。分析结果与我们最初的假设不一致，即有不可忽视比例的消费者群体显示，包括定价、产品种类和配送服务在内的因素的重要性增加，而使用EC平台的基本利益减少。关于综合项目的分析结果，大多数男性和女性群体唯一普遍观察到的变化是包裹投递使用的增加。结果表明，由于大流行导致EC平台消费者需求机制发生各种变化，消费者使用EC平台的观念变化并不像预期的那么简单。
