Impact of display strategies on sales performance in community group-buying channel: Evidence from a Chinese chain retailer

Although community group-buying (CGB) has been extensively studied by numerous scholars, there is a significant lack of empirical research quantifying the effects of display strategies on sales in this channel. How do display order and description length of a product affect its sales performance on CGB platforms? This study addresses this question by analyzing a unique CGB transaction dataset. By employing econometric models, we uncover intriguing insights into the relationship between display order, description length and product sales in CGB channels. Our findings indicate that the display order significantly negatively impacts sales, while product description length has a significant positive effect in CGB channels. Additionally, we also examined the role of price in moderating the effects of display order and description length on sales. The findings reveal that price mitigates the negative impact of display order on sales, with the effect disappearing entirely for products priced above 65 RMB. Furthermore, price dampens the positive influence of description length on sales, as adding more length no longer significantly boosts sales when the price surpasses, for our data set, 48 RMB.