Pre-Purchase User Perceptions of Attributes and Post-Purchase Attitudes in Building Successful Online Retail Promotional Strategies

Introduction

The demand of services is increasing and the companies are responding with a rage of promotional strategies to effectively meet new demands of its customers. The organization in Ems markets has already commenced on the trend of using internet and e-commerce models. The Ems has huge population and infrastructure challenges. The most of retailing in Ems or least developed countries is still as unorganized sector. In such market the role and significance of E-commerce is still explored, but has shown huge potential. E-Commerce is traditionally described as a form of transaction that enables the firm/retailer and the purchaser/procurer to interact electronically rather than through physical exchanges or direct physical contact (Yu, Guo, Guo, & Huang, 2011). Originally, the term E-Commerce was applied to the implementation of transactions through electronic applications such as electronic data exchange (Valaei, Rezaei, Ismail, & Oh, 2016). However, with the arrival of the Internet in the mid 1990’s, E-commerce started to mainly refer to the sales of goods and services on the Internet and primarily using electronic payment methods (Carmona et al., 2012). Most of online retail companies are endeavoring to increase channel synergies by enabling customers to purchase products via the Internet medium and then collect the goods at the firm’s available local stores (Mahar, Salzarulo, & Daniel Wright, 2012; Rezaei, Emami, & Valaei, 2016). Hence, promoting successful online retailing according to user perceptions of E-Commerce attributes and post-purchase attitudes of users is important. There are many reasons why firms are considering E-Commerce as their core business activities/model (Rezaei, Amin, Moghaddam & Mohamed, 2016). E-Commerce has the great potential to change the way people and firm interact which each other and offers efficiencies and effective ways in the form of decreasing the operational and procedure cost, development of market access and information (Ashworth, Schmidt, Pioch, & Hallsworth, 2006; Lee, Lee, Kim, & Lee, 2003). In fact, E-retail as a channel signifies a great opportunity to reduce the firm’s expenses, expand the channels to several market segments, and grow and boost loyal customers, connecting with strong new business models and potential global market development (Ashworth et al., 2006; Lee et al., 2003). E-Commerce is no longer considered as a threat to firms in the retail industry, and it is a significant phenomenon (Wrigley & Currah, 2006). E-commerce businesses models provide numerous benefits compared to offline retail and other operators (Lu & Liu, 2013), although there are some barriers for consumers wanting to perform a B2C transaction in E-Commerce (Yu et al., 2011).