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1. Introduction
Due to competitive pressures and growing demands of customers, retailers are continually adding new channels to serve customers. This proliferation of marketing channels has provided much comfort, convenience and flexibility to customers but has brought extensive challenges for retailers. In the single purchase process customers are using different combination of channels to maximize the benefits of shopping, which has eventually made understanding the consumer channel choice behaviour complex and unpredictable (Coughlan et al., 2001). The new empowered customer seeks hybrid utilities (Chiu et al., 2011; Kalyanam and Tsay, 2013) by exploiting particular channel qualities across different stages of the buying process (Konuş et al., 2008; Van Bruggen et al., 2010) leading to “showrooming and webrooming phenomenon”. Online buyers are increasingly pursuing “webrooming” behaviour which implies the usage of online channels before buying at physical stores (Andrews et al., 2016; Flavián et al., 2016), while “showrooming” denotes the intentional visit to a physical store before buying online (Rapp et al., 2015; Verhoef et al., 2015). The advent of online retail and penetration of internet has further fuelled the passage to such “unconventional behaviour” which scholars in the past have commonly referred to as “free riding behaviour” (Telser, 1960; Singley and Williams, 1995) and modern day scholars acknowledge it as “research shopper phenomenon” (Verhoef et al., 2007; Wang et al., 2015) and “hybrid shopping behaviour” (Kalyanam and Tsay, 2013).
PwC’s Annual Global Total Retail Consumer Survey (2015) contended that 70 per cent of consumers globally have intentionally collected information online and later bought the product offline. The Forrester Research (2014) in a report focussed at predicting the cross-channel sales in Europe from 2013 to 2018 founded webrooming behaviour to be a common pattern among the cross-channel free riders who switch channels to maximize the benefits of shopping (Verhoef et al., 2007). The report claimed that “webrooming sales outweigh online sales by 500 per cent and 44 per cent of all in-store purchases are expected to be influenced by web by the year 2018”. It becomes important for the marketers to understand and deal with this trending issue (Ailawadi and Farris, 2017) as it significantly affects online profits (Chiu et al., 2011). Surprisingly, while...