Impact of Shopee online attributes on customer engagement in grocery industry: a solicitation of stimulus-organism-response theory

The retail industry was tested during COVID-19 and had to change its thinking promptly. This research investigates consumers' choices in online food purchasing behaviour to investigate the impact on the repurchase intention of groceries, which has recently shown rapid growth in Malaysia. This research focuses on user experience factors (i.e., website quality, product quality and promotion strategy) affecting customer engagement and repurchase intention in the online grocery market, uses the Stimulus-Organism-Response model and e-commerce marketing strategies to study consumer behaviour, especially on the Shopee grocery website. Finally, vendors expect to obtain a high repurchase intention rate as the response variable.

This research uses a convenient sampling method. The survey was conducted with 562 valid data collected by online questionnaire. SPSS analysed the data for descriptive analysis and Smart PLS-SEM for inferential cohabitation analysis. The results showed that, first, this research had increased academic understanding of SOR theory and repurchase intention in the scholarship of strategic marketing management. Second, this research provides theoretical enlightenment through website quality, product quality and promotion strategy as antecedents of customers' emotional, cognitive and behavioural responses to develop a more comprehensive customer experience model in an online shopping environment. Third, the website quality, product quality, and promotion strategy online shops offer positively correlate with customer engagement. Results also showed that, first, before implementing the online marketing plan, the vendors should focus on improving the website quality, especially the sense of website design, on arousing the customers' positive emotions. Second, website security is critical to protecting customer privacy and transactions. Third, the vendors should encourage the live streamers to communicate and interact with the customers, affecting the customers' participating behaviour during the live streaming. The results implied that the critical website attributes identified positively affect customer engagement and a positive correlation between customer engagement and customer repurchase intention, which are consistent with previous studies. This research broadens the scalability of previous studies in the e-commerce industry context