Towards rebuilding the highstreet: Learning from customers’ town centre shopping journeys

Patronage in town centres has been fluctuating over the past few years, indicating that consumers are buying elsewhere in pursuit of better and more fulfilling shopping experiences. This is concerning as patronage is considered an indicator of high streets vitality and viability. To help understand the changing patterns of patronage, especially related to the growth in online retail spending, this study sheds light on key touchpoints that influence the town centre shopping experience. Using the customer journey framework and drawing insights from datasets of two central UK regions, we provide new contribution to town centre research by capturing significant and specific physical and digital touchpoints in the town centre shopping journey, thus developing our understanding of the determinants of the town centre shopping experience. Consequently, this work provides recommendations for town centre management to help improve town centre patronage by developing customers’ experience with shopping-specific touchpoints.     

Seamless experience in the context of omnichannel shopping： scale development and empirical validation

In recent years, delivering a superior seamless experience (SE) for customers has become one of the most crucial aspects of omnichannel marketing for omnichannel retailers. However, research lacks a common understanding of what the SE is and how customers evaluate the SE throughout their omnichannel shopping journeys, and the effects of the SE on important customer behaviors remain unexplored. Drawing on omnichannel customer experience research, following the scale development process, this research conceptualize and develop a scale to measure the SE construct. Building on the customer experience quality framework, this research further examines the effects of customers’ prior SE on repurchase intention, word of mouth (WOM), and customer influence behavior in the omnichannel shopping context. The SE scale is developed and validated by performing 15 semi-structured interviews, 62 open-ended questionnaires, and three online surveys with 884 useable respondents in total. The effects of SE are then validated via partial least squares modeling with 307 useable respondents. The findings confirm that the SE construct is a formative second-order construct composed of six reflective first-order dimensions. Our empirical findings indicate that the overall SE has a direct and significant impact on the foregoing three customer behaviors. Managers can use the SE scale as an effective omnichannel approach to design a seamless shopping journey and maintain long-term relationships with customers.     

How does shopping duration evolve and influence buying behavior? The role of marketing and shopping environment

This study investigates how promotional activities, mall size, and past shopping experiences affect customer shopping duration, and elucidates how shopping duration induces immediate, transient, and long-term effects on customer decisions of whether and how much to buy in the offline shopping mall format. We simultaneously model purchase incidence, purchase amount, and shopping duration to examine empirically the constructs’ dynamic impacts. The proposed model is calibrated using six-year-long transaction data of 43,326 customers that patronize malls operated by a large retail firm. The results reveal that shopping duration leads to an immediate increase in the amount spent by customers in a given period. The transient effects of shopping duration on purchase incidence and amount are significantly positive. However, in the long term, while purchase frequency appears to increase with cumulative shopping duration, purchase amount is negatively affected. Further, shopping duration increases with the size of the mall visited and the level of promotion but tends to converge to a lower level in the long term. Managerial implications for effectively managing customer experience are discussed.     

Challenging the "integration imperative": A customer perspective on omnichannel journeys

Omnichannel literature largely assumes that retailers should integrate touchpoints across channels to promote seamless experiences. This paper challenges this assumption by exploring how perceived journey integration affects customer experience in omnichannel retailing. A qualitative study reveals that two dimensions of journey integration—consistency and connectivity—interact to form four patterns of omnichannel journeys, each prompting distinct experiences. When looking at this phenomenon through the customer’s perspective, we find that there are cases in which low consistency or connectivity can trigger positive experiences, contradicting extant literature. We then formulate research propositions that challenge the “integration imperative” in the omnichannel literature and provide managerial implications for retail firms that want to improve their customers’ experiences.     

Is showrooming really so terrible? start understanding showroomers

The customer journey is more omni-channel than ever. In this scenario, so-called showrooming behavior emerges as a growing trend that is usually considered by retailers as a threat. The purpose of this research is to analyze whether showrooming, when compared with online buying behavior in which the customer does not visit the store prior to the purchase, has a positive effect on the price paid online by the customer. The empirical research is based on the database compiled by GfK, which contains detailed information about the shopping journey of 4067 customers who purchased products from different retail sectors. The results, derived from the estimation of several regression models, reveal that showroomers who use their smartphones in store are more likely to purchase products at a higher price, which explains why these customers can be of special interest to retailers.     

Satisfaction of mall shoppers: A study on perceived utilitarian and hedonic shopping values

Declining consumer footfall and diminishing sales in Indian metro cities have guided the expansion of malls in cities of central India. Shoppers of these cities are unfamiliar with the mall concept and have limited exposure of shopping values in the past. The present research focused on the influence of utilitarian and hedonic shopping values on satisfaction of mall shoppers of central India Bhopal by establishing a proposed research framework based on 288 responses from two shopping malls, using utilitarian and hedonic dimensions of shopping values. Confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM) are used to analyze and validate the proposed research framework. The result supports the relationship between shopping values and customer satisfaction, where both the shopping values show positive significant influences on customer satisfaction. Therefore this research paper would help mall owners to focus on these shopping values effectively and efficiently while planning malls in central India for gaining competitive advantage, attracting new customer and hold their profitable customers by enhancing customer satisfaction with shopping values in the current retail scenario.     

Does emotional labor moderate customer participation and buying?

Two studies examined whether employees’ emotional labor as perceived by customers, moderates the relationship between customers’ participation and money spent. In Study I, 30 in-depth interviews were conducted with customers to examine participation during shopping as well as customers’ awareness of their service employees’ behaviors. The interviews revealed two types of customer participation: emotional engagement and physical effort. Based on Study I, Study II investigated 114 customers, and the moderating role of perceived employees’ emotional labor on the relationships between customer participation and spending money. Even when customers were highly involved in the purchasing process, they spent less money when they observed employee inauthenticity as manifested in Surface Acting. However, Deep Acting positively moderated the relationship between customer participation and spending money. These findings help shed light on the circumstances in which customer participation is strengthened (leading to greater spending) or weakened.     

Cross-selling across stores or within a store? Impacts of cross-buying behavior in online shopping malls

Abstract

This study investigates the impacts of cross-buying behavior in an online shopping mall where customers can purchase from additional product categories from various independent stores. We focus on the extent to which store loyalty and relationship duration moderate the cross-buying effects on three behavioral traits: customers’ purchase rate, lifetime duration, and spending. The results reveal that customers who engage in cross-buying more intensely purchase more frequently, have longer expected lifetime duration, and spend higher amounts in each transaction. The impacts on purchase frequency and customer retention are even greater for customers who exhibit higher behavioral loyalty toward some stores. However, store loyalty is found to weaken the association between cross-buying and average spending. Further, relationship duration appears to weaken the effects of cross-buying on purchase rate and spending. These results provide new insights into the impacts of cross-buying on customer value as well as managerial implications for shopping mall owners.     

Do Farmers' Market and Specialty Food Store Customers Differ in the Effects of Perceived Utilitarian and Hedonic Shopping Values?

This study explored differences in the effects of perceived utilitarian and hedonic shopping values on customer satisfaction for the two separate groups of the agricultural product marketing channel: farmers' markets and specialty food stores. Empirical data were collected from customers of agricultural product retailers located in Taiwan (N = 412). The results show that different agricultural product marketing channels provide different values to their customers. Farmers' market customers experience a greater hedonic value, and specialty food store customers experience a greater utilitarian value. In addition, the perceived utilitarian and hedonic shopping values of farmers' market customers are more highly positively associated with customer satisfaction than are those of specialty food store customers.     

Online Customer Experience in e-Retailing: An empirical model of Antecedents and Outcomes

The theoretical understanding of online shopping behavior has received much attention. Less focus has been given to the formation of the customer experience (CE) that results from online shopper interactions with e-retailers. This study develops and empirically tests a model of the relationship between antecedents and outcomes of online customer experience (OCE) within Internet shopping websites using an international sample. The study identifies and provides operational measures of these variables plus the cognitive and affective components of OCE. The paper makes contributions towards new knowledge and understanding of how e-retailers can provide effective online experiences for customers.     

Understanding Customer Engagement and Loyalty: A Case of Mobile Devices for Shopping

This study aims at developing and validating a measurement model for customer engagement with specific focus on mobile devices for shopping. Further, role of customer engagement in building customer loyalty is explored. The research in this investigation used three studies for developing customer engagement scale and validating the proposed model. The study involved data collection from experts and users through varied methods including in-depth interviews, and surveys. Further structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data. Findings of this study include development and validation of customer engagement as second order construct arising out of six different customer experiences - social-facilitation, self-connect, intrinsic enjoyment, time-filler, utilitarian and monetary evaluation experiences. Further, the study established significant role of customer engagement in predicting customer loyalty in addition to existing constructs of satisfaction and convenience. This study contributes to evolving scholarly research on customer engagement. This study further provides a framework to retailers for devising matrices to track experiences and engagement of customers on mobile devices for shopping. Further, retailers may be able to use customer engagement to differentiate themselves from competition in attracting merchants and advertisers.     

An integrative conceptual framework for analyzing customer satisfaction with shopping trip experiences in grocery retailing

Grocery retailers aim to satisfy customers, and because grocery shopping trips are frequently recurring, they must do so continuously. Surprisingly, little research has addressed satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trips. This article therefore develops a conceptual framework for analyzing customer satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trip experiences within an overall ‘disconfirmation of expectations model’ of customer satisfaction. The contribution of the framework is twofold. First, by focusing on satisfaction with individual grocery shopping trips, previous research on satisfaction is extended to a context marked by frequently recurring, often tedious and routine activities. Understanding what causes satisfaction/dissatisfaction with individual shopping trips is required to explain overall, cumulative satisfaction with a retailer, which has been the focus of prior research on satisfaction in the retailing literature. Second, the framework synthesizes and integrates multiple central concepts from different research streams into a common framework for analyzing shopping trip satisfaction. Propositions are derived regarding the relationships among the different concepts in the framework and suggestions for future research are offered.     

Change in technology-enabled omnichannel customer experiences in-store

This paper explores changes in technology-enabled omnichannel customer experiences in stores over a five-year period (2014–2019). It contributes to the omnichannel-experience-management literature through customer technology-enabled touchpoints within fashion retail. Adopting an exploratory qualitative approach, primary data were obtained using semi-structured interviews with millennial consumers. The findings demonstrate the growing importance of implementing and integrating in-store technologies to improve customer experience. From these, two models are developed: “technology-induced customer experience in-store”; and “technology-enabled customer shopping journey in-store”.     

Drivers of customer satisfaction in the grocery retail industry: A longitudinal analysis across store formats

The design of satisfactory shopping experiences remains one of the main challenges for building long-term profitability in modern retailing. Therefore, companies are interested in identifying the key drivers of the service execution that shape customer shopping satisfaction. In this study, we developed a standardized questionnaire for evaluating the shopping experience, and conducted a large study in several grocery stores across different formats during a time span of five years. The resulting rich dataset enabled us to uncover interesting patterns using both individual and store-level analyses. Our results indicate that larger store formats are associated with greater satisfaction levels. When looking at the marginal effects of the various elements of customer service, we found that some specific elements of service execution present significant differences across store formats. In addition, we identified loss aversion on shopping experience, since poor performance impacts more on customer satisfaction than superior performance. Finally, our store-level analysis sheds light on how changes in the service performance determine changes in the shopping experience in the same store. These implied results may guide store and chain managers to evaluate the role of the store execution elements better, and to design the customer shopping experience successfully.     

Loyalty Formation for Different Customer Journey Segments

The proliferation of new touchpoints empowers today’s customers to design their own journey from search to purchase. To address this new complexity, we segment customers by their use of specific touchpoints in the customer journey, investigate the association of several covariates with segment membership, consider the rise of mobile devices as potential “game changers” of existing segments, and explore how the relationships among product satisfaction, journey satisfaction, customer inspiration, and customer loyalty differ across segments. Based on anticipated utility theory and using latent class analyses on large-scale data from two samples of 2,443 and 2,649 journeys, we identify five time-consistent segments―store-focused shoppers, pragmatic online shoppers, extensive online shoppers, multiple touchpoint shoppers, and online-to-offline shoppers―that differ considerably in their touchpoint and mobile device usage, their segment-specific covariates, and their search and purchase patterns. The five segments remain unchanged in the two data sets even though the usage of mobile devices has increased substantially. Furthermore, we find that the relationships between various loyalty antecedents and customer loyalty differ between the segments. The insights from this paper help retailers develop segment-specific customer journey strategies.     

Enhancing value for Chinese shoppers: The contribution of store and customer characteristics

This study tested the relationships between store and customer characteristics with perceived value and customer loyalty in retailing in China. Survey data were collected from shoppers in department stores (n=200) and supermarkets (n=200) in the tier 2 coastal city of Tianjin. Data for each type of store were analysed separately using structural models. In supermarkets, value was predicted by quality and price, but for department stores, only the customer orientation of the store was significant, suggesting that customers seek different shopping experiences in each context. In each case, value mediated the links to loyalty and, for supermarkets, choice of merchandise and consumer time pressure demonstrated direct links to loyalty. The paper discusses the implications of the findings, and concludes with possible future research.     

Better or Worse? Effects of online promotion habits on customer value: An empirical study

Online frequent and uninterrupted price discounts easily cause customers to form general tendencies to purchase promotions, or ‘online promotion habits’. Compared with offline promotion shopping, the distinct features of online promotion shopping make customer behaviours highly changeable and leave the effects of online promotion habits on customer value a puzzle. Using a dataset of real transactions from a leading online apparel retailer in China, this study makes continuous observations of customers’ online promotion habits. Drawing on the behavioural learning theory, we empirically investigate the dynamic effects of online promotion habits on customer value. The results reveal that after customers form online promotion habits, their customer value increases significantly. Furthermore, among customers with online promotion habits, online promotion habits exert an inverted U-shaped effect on customer value. Namely, as online promotion habits strengthen, customer value increases accordingly, yet negative outcomes show if online promotion habits exceed a certain level. We discuss the theoretical and managerial implications of our findings, which will enable researchers and practitioners to measure and dynamically manage customers’ online promotion habits.     

Customer Experience Management in Retailing: An Organizing Framework

Survival in today's economic climate and competitive retail environment requires more than just low prices and innovative products. To compete effectively, businesses must focus on the customer's shopping experience. To manage a customer's experience, retailers should understand what “customer experience” actually means. Customer experience includes every point of contact at which the customer interacts with the business, product, or service. Customer experience management represents a business strategy designed to manage the customer experience. It represents a strategy that results in a win-win value exchange between the retailer and its customers. This paper focuses on the role of macro factors in the retail environment and how they can shape customer experiences and behaviors. Several ways (e.g., promotion, price, merchandise, supply chain and location) to deliver a superior customer experience are identified which should result in higher customer satisfaction, more frequent shopping visits, larger wallet shares, and higher profits.     

Omni-channel retailing: propositions,examples and solutions

Customers are not passive agents, but intrinsic to the value creation process. Because retailers are the customer’s link to the marketplace they are uniquely placed to develop value co-creation opportunities that give themselves a strategic advantage. Omni-channel retailing is a means to create an advantage by forging deeper customer relationships and potentially developing new markets. Omni-channel retailing can appeal to the heterogeneity in customers’ shopping orientations with the aim of providing a seamless cross-channel experience. However, without a clear strategic purpose, omni-channel initiatives can easily result in unbeneficial – or worse, counterproductive – investments. To address this, the purpose of this paper is to formulate guiding principles to facilitate decision-making with respect to developing an omni-channel marketing strategy. Consequently, two complementary research streams are presented. The first pertains to strategic considerations regarding omni-channel retailing; the second pertains to value co-creation as seen through a service-dominant logic lens. These research streams are then linked to derive five propositions– along with examples and solutions – to assist retailing decision-makers when developing an omni-channel marketing strategy. These propositions underline the importance of viewing channels as value-facilitating resources that should be aligned with the customer’s decision journey.