Study of Consumer Dissatisfaction with the Use of O2O Platforms in Retail Industry in China

In recent years, O2O (Online to Offline) business model is developing rapidly in the retail industry, and retail-based O2O platforms are popular among users in China. However, the transaction risks associated with "online booking - offline consumption" are likely to cause customer dissatisfaction, which makes retail-based O2O platforms face difficulties such as user churn. Therefore, to address this situation, this study focuses on the users who have experienced dissatisfaction with retail-based O2O platforms to identify the level of customer dissatisfaction with purchases on retail-based O2O transaction in China, and the factors that determine their intention to make repeat purchases, and has important implications for reducing user churn as well as increasing the revenue of retail-based O2O platforms. This paper studies the relationships among customer expectation-disconfirmation, customer dissatisfaction, and repurchase intention based on the expectation-disconfirmation theory. Under the unique tripartite relationship in O2O business, this paper divided expectation-disconfirmation and customer dissatisfaction into two types (online process and offline process). In addition, perceived equity, which operationalized outcome equity, procedure equity, and interaction equity, is integrated into the research model to explore the direct impacts of perceived equity on customer dissatisfaction. SPSS and AMOS are used to assess the data quality and model quality, and then SmartPLS is used to verify the structural equation model. The results show that the customer expectation-disconfirmation and perceived equity can lead to customer dissatisfaction, which can reduce the customer repurchase intention on O2O platforms. In the end, the author provides suggestions to the platform parties and offline service providers in the retail-based O2O model based on the result.