In this information era, it is understandable that customers have to face and deal with information overloads all the time. On the other hand, customers will also be blessed to have countless alternatives both online and offline whenever they would like to purchase something, material or non-material. Thus firms currently face more challenges than ever before as the competition has become far more intense. They not only have to attract new customers, but also retain current ones. Sometimes the latter could even be way more vital to the survival and development of firms.
Since online communities have become far more popular than ever before, their members are being paid close attention to for being an essential study object. In general, they could be divided into two distinctive groups, namely posters, who post text and non-text threads, comments and engage in conversations, and lurkers, who would not participate like posters in public but still read threads and observe others’ behaviors.
The IT giant Amazon has been extensively testing its first smart offline store “Amazon Go” in its hometown Seattle, Washington since its exposure at the end of last year (González, 2016). This concept store has gained significant popularity as it claims to have no cashiers or checkout lines thanks to computer vision, deep learning algorithms and sensor fusion.
Consumer Value Creation 