Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
Since the last few decades, the retailing industry has witnessed a dramatic shift from the single-channel retailing format to the multichannel retailing environment. The present-day “technology-enabled” retailing environment empowers customers to shop at any time of the day and from anywhere. Although shoppers have been benefitted with this increased flexibility and convenience, it has brought extensive challenges for retailers (Neslin et al., 2006), and one such critical challenge is “webrooming” (Flavián et al., 2016). The advent of internet and proliferation of marketing channels has provided impetus to consumer’s cross-channel free riding activities (Van Bruggen et al., 2010; Chiu et al., 2011), and “webrooming” has indeed emerged as the most dominant form of free-riding behavior (Van Baal and Dach, 2005; Chiu et al., 2011; Kalyanam and Tsay, 2013; Frasquet et al., 2015). Recent researchers in multichannel domain corroborate webrooming as the most popular form of multichannel shopping behavior (Chou et al., 2016; Flavián et al., 2016). Webrooming denotes the buying behavior of those consumers who first visit an online store for collecting information before purchasing products offline (Flavián et al., 2016; Ailawadi and Farris, 2017; Wong et al., 2018). According to D’Avanzo and Pilato (2015), 72 percent of consumers in the USA agreed on examining the product online before making the final purchase of the same product offline. Likewise, according to Google Consumer Barometer (2015), 48 percent of European consumers research products online before purchasing them offline. PwC’s Annual Global Total Retail Consumer Survey (2015) contended that 70 percent of consumers globally have intentionally collected information online before purchasing offline. The Forrester research (2014) claimed that “webrooming sales are currently five times larger than online sales and it is expected that by the year 2018, 44 percent of all in-store purchases will be influenced by web.”
Despite rising statistics (Chiu et al., 2011; Flavián et al., 2016) and the endorsed negative relationship between webrooming and the profitability of online retailers (Chiu et al., 2011), the phenomenon has not been given much attention. While a number of studies have examined the cross-channel free-riding behavior of the shoppers (Van Baal and Dach, 2005; Schröder and Zaharia, 2008; Chiu et al., 2011; Chou et al., 2016),...