Showrooming, webrooming, and operational strategies for competitiveness

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Jiao, Chuanya; Hu, Bin
• 署名单位: Chinese Academy of Sciences; University of Science & Technology of China, CAS; University of Texas System; University of Texas Dallas
• 刊物名称: PRODUCTION AND OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1059-1478
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.13747
• 发表日期: 2022
• 页码: 3217-3232
• 关键词: Decision tree; free sampling; in-store research assistance; reverse showrooming

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 studying 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 noninformational 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.