The Insights, “Comfort” Effect and Bottleneck Breakthrough of “E-Commerce Temperature” during the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

The impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on fresh food e-commerce has led to a loss of consumers, and “e-commerce temperature” is seen as an important means of alleviating consumer dissatisfaction and retaining consumers. To explore the connotation and effect of it, and to break through possible “comfort” bottlenecks, we used online reviews of the Jingdong fresh food platform as research data, mined the characteristics of “e-commerce temperature” with the help of the LDA topic model, and evaluated the mechanism of “e-commerce temperature” on consumer satisfaction during the pandemic by using quasi-natural experiments and Word2vec-based sentiment analysis. The results show that “e-commerce temperature” has five connotations of logistics commitment, humanized delivery, health pledge, pandemic perseverance, and consumer care, which can effectively mitigate the loss of consumer satisfaction. Interestingly, we found that the “e-commerce temperature” has a limited “comfort” effect. Additionally, further social network analysis shows that the bottleneck is mainly due to the consumers’ psychological gaps when comparing the usual e-commerce services, and cretailers can repair them through financial compensation and spiritual solace. The study explores e-commerce service quality at different pandemic stages with the help of text mining techniques, enriches the theory of e-commerce research, and alleviates the Hawthorne bias in traditional empirical studies. This study also provides a reference for e-retailers to improve service quality and respond to emergencies in a changing post-pandemic era.

Multi-angle perception and convolutional neural network for service quality evaluation of cross-border e-commerce logistics enterprise

“…Based on the service quality gap model, relevant scholars analyzed the service level of urban pension institutions and proposed corresponding countermeasures to narrow the gap between the elderly’s perception and expectation of service quality. The service quality gap model has been applied in various industries, which is mainly based on qualitative research to improve the service quality by mining the causes of the service quality gap ( Lv, Wang & Ma, 2022 ; Wang & Wang, 2022 ; Yang et al, 2022 ).…”

Understanding Antecedents That Affect Customer Evaluations of Head-Mounted Display VR Devices through Text Mining and Deep Neural Network

“…Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), which is a popular technique in topic modeling, assumes that documents are generated from a mixture of topics, and each topic is a distribution over words. Through LDA, topics can be identified based on the connection between words across documents [31,32]. In this study, we examine whether there are topics that are missed by the variables selected in the previous studies using the Intertopic Distance Map derived from topic modeling.…”

Understanding Customer Opinion Change on Fresh Food E-Commerce Products and Services—Comparative Analysis before and during COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Fresh food e-commerce faces tremendous pressures to meet the evolving customer needs, which may influence customer satisfaction and finally make or break their business. Previous literature on the impact of COVID-19 on fresh food e-commerce studied the change in food prices during the pandemic situation [6], customer demand, and customer consumption frequency for online fresh food during the pandemic [4,7,8], the change in fresh food distribution and retail models owing to the COVID-19 outbreak [9,10], factors influencing the purchasing tendency of fresh food e-commerce customers [11][12][13][14][15], and factors affecting customer satisfaction during the pandemic [8,16,17].…”