Abstract
The purpose of this study is to identify the customers' primary topics of concern regarding online retail brands that are shared among Twitter users. This study collects tweets associated with five leading UK online retailers covering the period from Black Friday to Christmas and New Year's sales. We use a combination of text analytical approaches including topic modelling, sentiment analysis, and network analysis to analyse the tweets. Through the analysis, we identify that delivery, product and customer service are among the most-discussed topics on Twitter. We also highlight the areas that receive the most negative customer sentiments such as delivery and customer service. Interestingly, we also identify emerging topics such as online engagement and in-store experience that are not captured by the existing literature on online retailing. Through a network analysis, we underscore the relationships among those important topics. This study derives insights on how well the leading online retail brands are performing and how their products and services are perceived by their customers. These insights can help businesses understand customers better and enable them to convert the information into meaningful knowledge to improve their business performance. The study offers a novel approach of transforming social media data into useful knowledge about online retailing. The incorporation of three analytical approaches offers insights for researchers to understand the hidden content behind the large collections of unstructured bodies of text, and this information can be used to improve online retailing services and reach out to customers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 37-50 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Decision Support Systems |
| Volume | 121 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2019 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This research is partially funded by the Government of Malaysia .
Funding Information:
Xiaojun Wang is a Professor of Operations Management in the School of Economics, Finance and Management, University of Bristol. His current research predominantly focuses on supply chain risk and resilience, low carbon manufacturing, eco-design, sustainability, and social media research. His research outputs have been published in many international journals including Production and Operations Management, European Journal of Operational Research, British Journal of Management, Computers in Human Behavior, Omega, International Journal of Production Economics, International Journal of Production Research, and Journal of the Operational Research Society. He is currently working on several research projects funded by a range of funding bodies including NERC, ESRC, the Royal Society, the Newton Fund, and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC).
Publisher Copyright:
© 2019 Elsevier B.V.
Keywords
- Online retailing
- Sentiment analysis
- Social media research
- Text analytics
- Topic modelling
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Management Information Systems
- Information Systems
- Developmental and Educational Psychology
- Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous)
- Information Systems and Management