Show/webrooming refers to a consumer inspecting a product at a brick-and-mortar (BM)/online retailer before purchasing it from a competing online/BM retailer. Despite retailers adopting price-matching and free-shipping policies, show/webrooming remains prevalent. We model different product value information that consumers can learn by visiting a BM retailer and researching an online retailer, and study consumers’ show/webrooming behavior in a unified model. We confirm that consumers can engage in show/webrooming for informational reasons, but webrooming may also be driven by a non-informational reason. We find that show/webrooming may respectively benefit BM and online retailers; in particular, there exist win-win-win outcomes where both retailers and the consumers benefit from show/webrooming. We propose in-store research assistance for BM retailers and free sampling for online retailers, and show that these operational strategies may improve the retailers’ competitiveness in the presence of show/webrooming. Our results are found to be robust in several model extensions (This chapter is adapted from the previously published paper: “Jiao, C., & Hu, B. (2022). Showrooming, webrooming, and operational strategies for competitiveness. Production and Operations Management, 31(8), 3217-3232”).

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Impact of Digital Technology Enabled Showrooming and Webrooming Behaviors on the Ecosystem of Multichannel Retailing

  • Feng Yang,
  • Xiaolong Guo,
  • Yugang Yu

摘要

Show/webrooming refers to a consumer inspecting a product at a brick-and-mortar (BM)/online retailer before purchasing it from a competing online/BM retailer. Despite retailers adopting price-matching and free-shipping policies, show/webrooming remains prevalent. We model different product value information that consumers can learn by visiting a BM retailer and researching an online retailer, and study consumers’ show/webrooming behavior in a unified model. We confirm that consumers can engage in show/webrooming for informational reasons, but webrooming may also be driven by a non-informational reason. We find that show/webrooming may respectively benefit BM and online retailers; in particular, there exist win-win-win outcomes where both retailers and the consumers benefit from show/webrooming. We propose in-store research assistance for BM retailers and free sampling for online retailers, and show that these operational strategies may improve the retailers’ competitiveness in the presence of show/webrooming. Our results are found to be robust in several model extensions (This chapter is adapted from the previously published paper: “Jiao, C., & Hu, B. (2022). Showrooming, webrooming, and operational strategies for competitiveness. Production and Operations Management, 31(8), 3217-3232”).