An Integrated Approach Towards Understanding Showrooming Behavior: A Conceptual Framework

摘要

Customers today are using multiple channels to harvest attribute based benefits and seek hybrid utilities to maximize the benefits of shopping (Gensler et al., 2012; Verhoef et al., 2007). These multichannel customers who utilize more than one channel in the single purchase process (Chiu et al., 2011) have created extensive challenges for retailers (Balasubra-manian et al., 2005) and one such critical challenge is 'show-rooming' (Verhoef et al., 2015; Gensler et al., 2017). Verhoef et al. (2015) defined showrooming "as a specific form of research shopping in which a shopper first searches offline and subsequently purchases online." Showrooming substan-tially affects the profits of brick and mortar stores (Mehra et al., 2013; Rapp et al., 2015) as a customer merely uses a physical store as a showroom to experience products and later purchases online. The cut throat competition faced by the offline stores from the online stores (Mehra et al., 2013), proposed negative impact of the showrooming behavior on the store performance (Rapp et al., 2015) and their fear of going obsolete (Konus et al., 2008) makes it imperative for academicians and practioners to address the showrooming issue. D'Avanzo and Pilato (2015) posited that 72% of the shoppers in the United States checked the products at the physical store before finally purchasing the products offline. As cited by Rejon-Guardia and Luna-Nevarez (2017), 70% of shoppers across Canada, England and United States agreed on following the showrooming sequence atleast once in their last purchases. Despite rising statistics on show-roomers and proposed negative significant impact of show-rooming on the profitability of the brick and mortar stores, the issue has not been given much attention. The present research addresses this gap by proposing an integrated TAM-TPB framework for analysing the showrooming behavior. The work utilizes and integrates the channel choice literature (Balasubramanian et al., 2005; Verhoef et al., 2007; Gensler et al., 2012; Wang et al., 2015) with anticipated regret view endorsed by Sheeran and Orbell (1999), uncertainty reduc-tion approach (Berger and Calabrese, 1975) and theory of social presence (Gefen and Straub, 2004) to enhance the understanding on showrooming sequence. Utilizing Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), the study proposes that perceived relative search and purchase benefits will deter-mine the consumer's attitude towards showrooming behvaiour. While on grounds of Technology Acceptance Model (Davis, 1989), we propose that ease of purchasing online and perceived usefulness of showrooming which emerges out of the prior visit to an offline store will also affect the shoppers attitude towards showrooming behavior along with the other proposed relationships. The model pre-sented is subject to empirical verification.