Knowledge and key factors driving successful market acquisition of shopping apps: Market strategies in China

This study seeks to elucidate dynamic evolution mechanisms and differential competitive effects of the following six core value elements on shopping platforms: Shopping Satisfaction, Quality of Goods, Value for Money, Community Shopping, Logistics Efficiency, and Trust Guarantee. We analysed 60,340 user reviews from the OPPO App Store collected between January 2023 and December 2024. Employing a Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic model to extract implicit thematic value elements and segmenting data into four-month intervals to calculate topic similarity, we identified five evolutionary phases: Stable Phase, Integration Phase, Differentiation Phase, Re-integration Phase, and Efficiency-Enhancement Phase. Findings revealed that platforms maintained a balanced deployment of all core elements during the Stable Phase. In the Integration Phase, Community Shopping and Logistics Efficiency were subsumed under Value for Money to deliver a ‘one-stop’ low-price, high-efficiency service. The Differentiation Phase further refined the Value for Money dimension, reinforcing social and personalised features. The Re-integration Phase optimised resource allocation across elements. The Efficiency-Enhancement Phase highlighted Logistics Efficiency as the principal support for the overall experience. A comparative analysis further demonstrated that different shopping apps orchestrated these six value elements dynamically to cultivate distinctive competitive advantages. Through meticulous adjustment of their product positioning, they achieved platform differentiation and market success. The proposed dynamic-evolution monitoring framework enriches the service marketing and dynamic capabilities theories, providing platform operators with a real-time monitoring and strategy-adjustment tool to excel in the fiercely competitive e-commerce arena.