Kleinlercher Kristina, Linzmajer Marc, Verhoef Peter C, Rudolph Thomas
Institute of Retail Management, University of St.Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland.
Department of Marketing, Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands.
Front Psychol. 2020 Nov 30;11:606798. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.606798. eCollection 2020.
Although webrooming has become common practice in omnichannel consumer behavior, only a few empirical studies have managed to shed light on the phenomenon. With this research work, we aim to investigate important antecedents of webrooming. We base our conceptual framework on anticipated utility theory and expect that customers' anticipated utility from using the physical store versus the online store for purchase can be predicted by four groups of antecedents: psychographic variables, shopping motivations, channel-related variables, and product-related variables. With the help of a data set from a large cross-national online survey in which 1497 customers reconstruct their last purchase journey, we differentiate webroomers from pure online shoppers. In addition, we disentangle customers who used retailer-owned, competitor-owned, and independent touchpoints along the search and purchase phase of the customer journey in order to characterize webroomers in an omnichannel context and assess their prevalence in different countries and industries. Our insights on the characteristics and antecedents of webrooming help retailers to detect and better understand the psychology behind the webrooming phenomenon from a consumer perspective in an omnichannel retailing environment. In addition, results from our exploratory analysis on the positive association between webrooming and customer spending contribute to research and practice by providing first evidence on the economic value of webrooming.
尽管线上线下融合购物已成为全渠道消费者行为中的常见做法，但仅有少数实证研究成功揭示了这一现象。通过这项研究工作，我们旨在探究线上线下融合购物的重要先行因素。我们的概念框架基于预期效用理论，并期望消费者在实体店与在线商店购物的预期效用能够通过四类先行因素进行预测：心理变量、购物动机、渠道相关变量和产品相关变量。借助一项大型跨国在线调查的数据集（其中1497名消费者重构了他们上一次的购物旅程），我们区分了线上线下融合购物者与纯在线购物者。此外，我们梳理了在客户旅程的搜索和购买阶段使用零售商自有、竞争对手自有及独立接触点的消费者，以便在全渠道背景下刻画线上线下融合购物者的特征，并评估其在不同国家和行业的普遍程度。我们对线上线下融合购物的特征及先行因素的见解，有助于零售商在全渠道零售环境中从消费者角度检测并更好地理解这一现象背后的心理。此外，我们对线上线下融合购物与消费者支出之间正相关关系的探索性分析结果，通过提供有关线上线下融合购物经济价值的初步证据，为研究和实践做出了贡献。
