| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立高雄第一科技大學 === 運籌管理研究所 === 101 === The 3PL (Third-Party Logistics) servie provider market is highly competitive now. It thus becomes critical for every 3PL to establish its competitive advantages. One of the ways is to identify customers’ requirements and characteristics of each market segment through market segmentation.
Past research about logistics market segmentation is primarily based on customers’ perception of logitics services and logistics service qualities. The research tries to validate the possibility of segmenting logistics market by actual data about customers’ purchasing behavior.
Targeting on organizational customers of the market, data are collected through questionnaire survey. It is shown that logistics market can be clustered into three groups - heavy-use quality-oriented, heavy-use high-level-decision-making oriented, and low-use price-oriented - through clustering analysis based on purchasing behaviors. However, the differences among these groups are limited with respect to customers’ requirements in logistics services and logistics service qualities. The features are more salient in sales volume and contracting relationship.
Based on the classification of 3PLs by Lai (2004), it is suggested that traditional freight forwarders (TFF) may take low-use price-oriented customers as target while full service providers (FSP) may target on both heavy-use customer segments.
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