The Effects of Online and Offline Customer Experiences on Customer Loyalty in Chinese Fresh E-commerce

Sammanfattning: With the gradual upgrade of fresh food consumption in China, the integration of online platforms and retail entities has brought more convenient and diverse fresh food consumption experiences to customers. This thesis is to explore how the customers loyalty in Chinese fresh e-commerce are affected by online and offline customer experience. This paper draws on strategic experience modules and situation experience theory and proposes three influencing factors respectively according to the two situations of online and offline. Specifically, this thesis analyzes the impact of the aesthetic experience, online service experience, and virtual community sense experience, environmental experience, service staff experience and community sense experience on customer loyalty. As a leader of fresh e-commerce, Hema Fresh has achieved great success especially during this epidemic and has been recognized by Chinese customers. This study collects 298 online questionnaires from Hema Fresh’s customers in China and uses SPSS for regression analysis to test these six factors. Empirical results show that enhancing customer aesthetic experience, online service experience, environmental experience and community sense experience can improve customer loyalty of fresh e-commerce in China, but our results do not show that virtual community sense experience and service staff experience can enhance customer loyalty. Meanwhile, this study finds that the effects of online and offline situations on customer loyalty of fresh e-commerce are different. By providing the experience and background of Chinese fresh e-commerce, it enriches the research on fresh e-commerce. Also, this study explores different types of customer experience impact on customer loyalty from the online and offline situations of customer consumption, contributing to the research on customer experience and provides implications for Chinese fresh e- commerce to improve customer loyalty.