Preference Characteristics on Consumers’ Online Consumption of Fresh Agricultural Products under the Outbreak of COVID-19: An Analysis of Online Review Data Based on LDA Model

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, China has adopted a zero-clearing policy under closed control. It is rather common for residents who are quarantined at home to buy fresh agricultural products online, when COVID-19 spread in big cities. Many e-commerce platforms are trying to develop online shopping channels for fresh agricultural products. However, negative comments and news about those platforms have been increasing because of several reasons, such as the difference in the quality of fresh products, inadequate categories of commodity and inefficient delivery caused by the shortage of personnel and so on. The smooth daily supply of online fresh agricultural products is conducive to soothing the pessimistic emotions and to encouraging their active obedience to epidemic prevention and control policy. Therefore, it is of great importance to explore the preference characteristics of consumers’ online purchase of fresh agricultural products under this critical situation. In this paper, firstly, Pycharm software is used to collect online comment texts of fresh agricultural products on the online platforms with a total of 34,546 pieces of evaluation data. Secondly, the collected data is preformed into the text preprocessing. To be specific, the obtained online comments are processed by Python, including the process of text duplication between sentences, text duplication within sentences and short sentence filtering. After that, processed texts are subjected to Jieba Text Segmentation to form the final word frequency ranking, involving two procedures, part-of-speech tagging and stop-words removal. Lastly, the results of the LDA model indicate the factors that influence consumers’ preferences when they purchase fresh agricultural products online. This study could not only identify the typical features of residents’ online shopping preference in the context of the spread of COVID-19, but also provide pragmatic suggestions for the local government to appease the residents’ negative emotions for the prevention of widespread complaints at the social level.