Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
The development of big data, artificial intelligence, and other technologies has advanced intelligent retail technology. Moreover, the retail landscape is changing as digital technology advances (Ferracuti et al., 2019). According to a McKinsey report, intelligent technology will have a $6.2 trillion impact on the world economy by 2025, especially in the retail industry. As an important practice of omni-channel marketing, offline retail is also an indispensable experience place in customers' shopping journey. Retailers are experimenting with smart retail to create a fluent, integrated customer experience. In December 2016, Amazon launched an internal test of Amazon Go, the first commercial practice of smart offline retail. In Amazon Go stores, consumers no longer need to scan items. The stores allow customers to scan their smartphones as they enter, pick up the items they want and leave. Machine vision, sensor fusion and deep learning technologies automatically detect when products are taken from or returned to shelves, and they track items in virtual shopping carts. When consumers leave the store, they are charged and automatically sent a receipt. All customers need is a smartphone, an Amazon account, and the Amazon Go app (Amazon, 2016). This kind of retail environment, which is called smart retail, has gone conceptually beyond the decentralized application of intelligent technology in the retail industry. Smart retail is a fully intelligent retail system that integrates multiple intelligent retail technologies into an offline shopping scenario revolutionizing the customer experience.
Prior studies have demonstrated that intelligent retail technology reduces operating costs, and improves the profitability of enterprises (Vazquez et al., 2017; Dacko, 2017; Renko and Druzijanic, 2014). However, in the era of retailing 4.0, customers pay more attention to the seamless and integrated omni-channel service experience. Researchers and practitioners began to consider whether the integration of intelligent technology could achieve the “1 + 1 > 2” synergistic effect, and whether an offline smart retail system could optimize the customer-focused experience. Since attracting customers is becoming a new challenge for smart retailers, in addition to the growing demand for a seamless customer purchasing experience, it is essential to study what influences customer engagement in the smart retail context.
To fill this gap, from the customer experience perspective, this paper examines how customer experience influences the...