An empirical study on traditional offline retailer’s switching intention towards community-based group buying program: A push–pull-mooring model

To enter the offline channel, the community-based group buying (CGB) platform usually recruits group leaders to perform corresponding tasks (i.e., creating new customers, information disseminating, marketing, and goods delivering). A major type of group leader is the traditional offline retailer, who runs a convenience store in the community and is considered as the core bond among three parties, namely, platforms, merchants, and consumers. Drawing upon the PPM theory and TAM model, this study aims to investigate the switching intention of traditional offline retailers to embrace platform’s recruitment and undertake group leader roles towards the CGB program. With primary data collected from 365 respondents, we establish a structural equation model and conduct the empirical analysis. Results suggest that both push and pull factors exert positive effects on convenience storekeepers’ switching intention, while the perceived risk (i.e., one of the mooring factors) hinders the switching intention. However, switching cost, as another mooring factor, does not significantly predict the switching intention. These additional constructs in the push–pull-mooring (PPM) model are considerably helpful for improving the understanding of traditional offline retailer’s switching intention towards community-based group buying and could offer several managerial implications for group buying platforms.