Compared with customers under the traditional business model, online customers have many new characteristics different from traditional customers due to their special consumption environment and special consumption methods, which are mainly reflected in the following aspects:
(1) Online customers are not restricted by geographical location and consumption time when making online purchases. With the continuous improvement of global network coverage, online customers and online enterprises have achieved “zero distance” interaction. The increasingly developed logistics system with the development of e-commerce has made online customers have an unprecedented convenient consumption experience. Online customers can enjoy products and services from other places or even foreign countries without leaving home, and the consumption time lag caused by geographical restrictions on previous products has also been reduced accordingly.
(2) The range of product and service choices is wider. Since the Internet has broken through the previous restrictions on consumption regions and consumption time, online customers have the opportunity to consider the same product from more different companies at the same time compared to traditional customers. The idea that customers are often only interested in the products and services of the same company due to the asymmetry between corporate product information and customer consumption information is becoming less and less. Online customers have more choices for products and services, which leads to a decreasing timeliness of online customers’ loyalty to enterprises, increasing mobility, and more dramatic dynamic changes in online customer resources.
(3) Online shopping is highly interactive. On the one hand, online customers have more opportunities to interact with merchants. The Internet provides an unprecedented high-speed platform for enterprises to publish product information, which can achieve “zero time difference” in enterprise product production and promotion. The community characteristics and social business models of some e-commerce websites also increase the opportunities for interaction between online customers and merchants. On the other hand, the mutual influence effect between online customers is more obvious. The transmission of online word-of-mouth information through the Internet makes the influence of merchants spread extremely quickly, and online customers are more likely to influence each other and quickly gather into a unique online group buying customer group.
(4) Online customer demand has a stronger timeliness. In the ever-changing network environment, the Internet has accelerated the speed of information update, and the needs of online customers will also change more easily with the changes in the information received, which requires online service providers to respond more quickly. In recent years, a large number of shopping websites at home and abroad have disappeared. The fundamental reason for this phenomenon is that they have become “zombie sites” that no one cares about due to customer loss within a certain period of time.
(5) Strong personalized demand. The enrichment, diversification and globalization of products and services in the online shopping market have prompted consumers to no longer fear the challenges of merchants and to formulate their own consumption criteria. When choosing products and services, online customers are more likely to rely on personal preferences, and their needs are more diversified and personalized.