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The aim of this paper is to study the relationship between the popularity of discount stores and the aggregate business cycle: Does discounters' market share go up during economic contractions and go down during economic expansions? Does the aggregate business cycle contribute to the long-term growth of discounters' success? Does the relationship between discounters and the economy differ across discounter types, namely hard versus soft discounters?

The study will consider the relationship between discounters' market share and the aggregate economy between 1991 and 2008 for 15 Western European countries. Moreover, aggregated data is provided for the Western European region as a whole, which distinguishes hard from soft discounters' share. Recent time-series techniques are used to disentangle the temporary versus permanent effects of economic contractions on discounters' share.

The aggregate business cycle induces temporary upward and downward swings in discounters' market share. Moreover, part of the increase in discounters' share during an economic contraction remains beyond the contraction, resulting in a permanent boost in discounters' popularity. Same substantive findings are found for each discount type (i.e. hard and soft).

In economic contraction years the growth rate of both hard and soft discounters accelerates, leaving permanent scars on the performance levels of traditional retailers. Discounters should try to further enhance their increased popularity when the economy turns sour. Traditional retailers, on the other hand, should try to prevent consumers from switching to discounters during contractions. Future research should explore the strategies that are called for in order to do this.

Discounters are the fastest growing grocery format in Europe. Traditional retailers can no longer afford to ignore them. As such, a better understanding of the drivers of this growth is called for. This study highlights one of the potential drivers, namely the economic climate, a driver that is widely discussed in the business press with substantial implications for grocery channel management.

This study examines the dynamic relationships of visit behavior in the multiple channels [personal computer (PC) and mobile channels] on online store sales performance.

The empirical data were from an online store for the period between August 14, 2015 and May 15, 2016. The data consisted of consumer visit behavior and online store sales performance. Vector autoregression with an exogenous variables model was adopted to investigate the dynamic relationships.

The empirical results show significant relationships between visit behavior metrics (number of visitors, average number of visits per visitor and average length of each visit) in the two channels and online store sales performance. The number of visitors through the PC and mobile channels strongly and positively affects online store sales performance both in the short term and in the longer term. Moreover, the number of visitors in the PC channel has the strongest influence on sales performance metrics, followed by the number of visitors and the average number of visits in the mobile channel. The PC channel's visit behavior metrics explain a larger proportion of the sales performance variance than that in the mobile channel.

The previous literature on consumer behavior in multichannel marketing mainly focuses on channel selection or migration, and examines the different factors affecting channel choice behavior. Little is known about the impacts of visit behavior in the multiple channels. This study adopts the heuristic-systematic information processing theory to unveil the impacts of visit behavior metrics in the PC and mobile channels on online store sales performance.