An Exploration of Cross-border E-commerce Consumer Feedbacks: An LDA Approach

Cross-border e-commerce (CBEC) has become an important channel to help a firm to go into the international market in China. The recent influx in development of CEBC has caused a simultaneous influx in accumulation of text data such as consumer feedback. To better understand consumer feedback, we collected data from a leading CBEC firm in China to explore the topics of feedback posted directly by their customers. We employed the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model to explore the potential topics focused on most by consumers. We found 35 primary topics are mentioned by both sellers and buyers. For the seller's perspective, we found that the topics such as commission, product audit, communication between seller and buyer, order management and traffic are most important. On the buyer's side, we found that return and refund, product tracking, product description, shipping time, and seller performance are the most mentioned topics. This study will help contribute to the understanding of how consumer feedback will help firms in many ways, including but not limited to recovering service and product failures, audit internal functions, and improve product quality.