Retailer–Consumer Sustainable Business Environment: How Consumers’ Perceived Benefits Are Translated by the Addition of New Retail Channels

Abstract

In the current era, consumers are living in a multi-channel shopping environment. Retailers are expanding their business channels to get the most out of their ongoing multi-channel businesses and to create a sustainable shopping environment for consumers. The extant literature is quite elaborative about the impact of new online channels on retailers, but a very limited part of the said literature discusses the impact of adding both new online/offline channels to the retailers’ existing business channels and the perceived benefits they create for consumers. This paper makes the comparison of multi-channel additions and their impacts on consumer benefits in creating a sustainable retailer–consumer business environment. This dimension of research is quite new regarding the subject of multi-channel shopping. In this paper, a simulated experimental design is adopted to analyze the impact of the multi-channel structure with a mix of different product types (experience and search) and the perceived benefit to consumers (perceived variety, perceived convenience, and perceived risk). The results show that, compared to the newly added offline channels, newly added online channels can make consumers more aware of the overall variety, increase perceived convenience, and reduce perceived risk. However, for retailers selling search products, the newly added online channel does not create any significant difference to the consumers’ overall perceived variety of the retailers.