Research on e-commerce customer repeat purchase behavior and purchase stickiness

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study the regularity of the e-commerce customer repeat purchase behavior, and provide new ideas and methods for e-commerce vendor’s e-commerce customer management. Design/methodology/approach: Through analysis of the priority in activity mechanism and new customers’ dynamic growth in customer’s purchase behavior, this paper builds a model of the customer’s purchase frequency, which can be verified by the empirical data gathered from www.taobao.com, www.jd.com, www.yhd.com and www.amazon.com. Findings: This paper discovers the regularity that the customer’s purchase frequency obeys power law distribution. Empirical data show that this model can represent the real repeat purchase process well. At the same time, it provides the theoretical basis for the vendor regional management by introducing the concept of stickiness and the corresponding methods of calculation. Research/limitations/implications: This study only focuses on the basic model of e-commerce customer’s repeat purchase and lack of study on influence factors about the characteristics of different vendors and it needs to make extensions considering fluctuation of new customers, or customer aging and loss. Practical/implications: This study provides a theoretical basis for vendor to take different marketing strategies through classifying customers based on the characteristic of purchase stickiness. Originality/value: The definition and calculation method of purchase stickiness is put forward for the first time, and the value of purchase stickiness changes with the number of purchase. It provides the theoretical basis for the vendor regional management, and will be good for further studying the e-commerce market about customer’s purchase behavior.