Consumers’ satisfaction factors mining and sentiment analysis of B2C online pharmacy reviews

BACKGROUND: In recent years, online pharmacies have been accepted by increasingly more consumers, and the prospects for online pharmacies are optimistic. This article explores the consumers’ satisfaction factors addressed in Business to Customer (B2C) online pharmacy reviews and analyzes the sentiments expressed in the reviews. The goal of this work is to help B2C online pharmacy enterprises identify consumers’ concerns, continuously improve the health services level. METHODS: This article was based on the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic model. From a third-party platform-based B2C online pharmacy and a proprietary B2C online pharmacy (JD Pharmacy and J1.COM, respectively), 136,630 pieces of over-the-counter (OTC) drug review data posted from January 1, 2015 to December 31, 2018 were selected as samples and used to explore the satisfaction factors of B2C online pharmacy consumers regarding the entire drug purchasing process. Then, the sentiments expressed in the drug reviews were analyzed with SnowNLP. RESULT: Categorization of the 12 factors identified by LDA showed that 5 factors were related to logistics; these 5 factors, which also included the most drug reviews, made up 38.5% of the reviews. The number of factors related to drug prices was second, with 3 factors, and reviews of drug prices made up 25.5% of the reviews. Customer service and drug effects each had two related factors, and a smaller percentage of these reviews (13.95%) were related to drug effects. Consumers still maintain positive opinions of JD Pharmacy and J1.COM. However, some opinions on logistics and drug prices are expressed. CONCLUSION: The most important task for online pharmacies is to improve logistics. It is better to develop self-built logistics. Both types of B2C online pharmacies can improve consumer viscosity by implementing marketing strategies. With regard to customer service, focusing on improving employees’ service attitudes is necessary.