Strategic return is a unique behavior pattern of online shopping. However, the current literature pays more attention to the general return behavior, and there is a lack of research on the strategic return behavior. Moreover, the existing research regards strategic return as a negative impact, mainly discusses the driving factors of strategic return and its impact on enterprise pricing, and ignores that strategic return may be an opportunity to enhance the relationship between consumers and enterprises. It is also unclear whether strategic return consumers have different purchase behaviors from other consumers. In view of this, this paper explores the differences in purchase rate and dropout rate between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers, and discusses the impact of cross-category purchase on the above differences from the perspective of consumers and based on the consumer learning theory.

Based on the improved Pareto/NBD model, this paper takes the consumers of an online retailer in the clothing industry from June 2016 to December 2018 as the research object, and extracts their objective shopping behavior data. The maximum likelihood estimation method is used to test the differences in purchase rate and dropout rate between strategic returning consumers and non-returning consumers, and the impact of cross-category purchase on them through multi-layer regression by gradually adding covariates to the model.

The results show that the purchase rate of strategic return consumers is significantly higher than that of non-return consumers, and the dropout rate of strategic return consumers is also significantly lower than that of non-return consumers. Moreover, the differences in purchase rate and dropout rate between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers without cross-category purchase behavior are more significant than those with cross-category purchase behavior. Therefore, this paper verifies the positive effect of strategic return, reveals the internal mechanism of the differences in purchase behavior between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers, enriches the research content of strategic return behavior, and expands the application scenario of consumer learning theory.

The main contributions of this paper are as follows: First, it finds that strategic return plays a positive role. That is, strategic return consumers have a high purchase rate and a low dropout rate, which promotes the theoretical research on consumer return behavior. Second, from the perspective of consumers, it discusses the differences in purchase rate and dropout rate between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers, which expands the research perspective of strategic return. Third, using actual shopping behavior data, it empirically examines the differences in purchase rate and dropout rate between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers, which makes up for the lack of empirical research in the field of strategic return. Fourth, it introduces the consumer learning theory into the strategic return scenario, which not only reveals the internal mechanism of the differences in purchase behavior between strategic return consumers and non-return consumers, but also enriches the research of consumer learning theory. The results also provide a theoretical basis for enterprises to adopt friendly sales methods and establish a warning mechanism of consumer dropout, so as to improve the purchase rate of consumers and reduce the risk of consumer dropout.