The Effect of Affiliate Marketing on Consumer Behavior, Purchase Intention and Purchase Decision

Abstract

In the era of globalization and also the current pandemic problem, competition in all areas of business is inevitable. Based on the 2020 Business Competition Index Executive Summary data, it shows that there is currently increasing business competition in every business sector at the middle level (Economic Directorate of the Business Competition Commission, 2020). This encourages every business owner to be able to foster communication and relationships with consumers for their retention and loyalty to the products or services offered by business people in order to continuously survive in the midst of market competition. As technology and the internet advances, human migration makes traditional marketing techniques less effective, so businesses are now doing marketing through digital marketing, one of which is content marketing. There was a shift in consumer behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic with the government's advice to stay at home making people change shopping patterns by carrying out online shopping activities for their daily needs, the results of a 2020 survey on Balinese people showed that 27.20% of respondents experienced an increase in online shopping activity . And recently Online Shopee offers products at low prices, affordable prices, lots of purchase discounts and free shipping to make consumers interested in making purchasing decisions online. Based on iPrice 2022 data, the app store rank and play store rank, Shopee is superior to Tokopedia and other online stores. One of the marketing strategies implemented by Shopee to transmit information to customers in an attractive way is through the Affiliate Program known as the Shopee Affiliate Program. This also applies to Bali Semanggi which uses a shopee affiliate. Purchase percentage data at Bali Semanggi recorded 60 percent of purchases online and 40 percent of purchases offline, which means that more buyers buy online as indicated by various factors that influence online buying decisions. such as affiliate marketing, consumer behavior and purchase intention. This research was conducted online by distributing e-questionnaires to Bali Semanggi Instagram followers. The population in this study were Instagram followers with 26.4 thousand followers. In this study, samples were taken to represent all population units. The analysis technique used is a structural equation model (Structural Equation Modeling – SEM) based on variance or component based SEM, known as Partial Least Square (PLS). The results of this study are that affiliate marketing has a positive and significant effect on consumer behavior and purchase intention, but on buying decisions it has an insignificant positive effect. For consumer behavior and purchase intention have a positive and significant effect on buying decisions.