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This study aims to identify, within the context of the French fashion industry, the characteristics of multichannel shoppers, that is, consumers who use more than one channel in a single shopping trip. We especially investigate whether consumers' focus on quality versus price affects their multichannel shopping tendency and their flexibilities in their shopping lists (basket flexibility).

We surveyed a representative sample of 400 French shoppers regarding fashion apparel purchasing. We use a logistic regression framework to measure the probability of a shopper becoming a multichannel shopper based on the key constructs and a battery of control variables.

The analysis shows that, in fashion buying, shoppers focused on quality and those with high basket flexibility have a higher probability of becoming multichannel shoppers. The probability becomes even greater when a shopper is both quality oriented and has basket flexibility.

We focus on the fashion apparel market for a deeper understanding of multichannel usage of products with both experience and search features. Future research can investigate other industries for higher generalizability.

Our research provides insights into multichannel fashion companies whose managements aim to effectively manage high-value customers who tend to use more channels when shopping. Specifically, an omnichannel marketing strategy should focus on capturing the quality-oriented and highly basket-flexible segment of consumers.

Our study provides evidence that for products having high experiential as well as search features, quality-oriented and highly flexible shoppers engage more in multichannel shopping. Because these characteristics are related to the long-term value of customers, we provide the link between multichannel marketing and firm profitability in the context of the fashion industry.

The purpose of this research is to investigate whether and how shopping well-being emerges from multichannel shopping. The multichannel shopper has more choice of where, when and how to shop, and could potentially experience greater shopping well-being than the single-channel equivalent. On the other hand, it is possible that multichannel shopping creates levels of complexity for consumers in terms of their channel decision processes, and therefore, the potential increase in shopping well-being may not actually occur.

An interpretive approach is adopted and narratives are used to provide a focus on the multichannel shopper’s lived experiences. Narrative generation was conducted with 12 participant shoppers from across the UK in March and April 2016.

Multichannel retailing does not deliver universally enhanced shopping well-being. Findings suggest that while well-being is enhanced by some aspects of multichannel shopping, diminished well-being is a more frequent outcome. Six themes emerged from the narratives delineating aspects of multichannel shopping which diminish well-being: finding what you want; ease and flexibility; staying in control; getting a fair deal; pleasure and fulfilment; guilt, regret and annoyance.

This research makes three contributions to our understanding of shopping well-being: by providing more in-depth insight than previous studies, by examining all shopping activity rather than recreational/discretionary shopping and by examining shopping well-being from a multichannel rather than single-channel perspective.

Consumers display complex shopping behaviors in the multichannel environment, which includes traditional retail stores and the internet. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effects of the customer-sales associate relationship, customers’ receptiveness to online store shopping, and their interaction effects on the customer’s attitude toward multichannel shopping behavior when the firm decides to establish an online store as the online channel. The authors also examine how customers’ multichannel shopping behavior affects their future spending intentions.

Survey data were collected by soliciting 231 customers who purchased cosmetics in department stores within the past three months. Subjects were asked to give their overall evaluation of their offline and online shopping experiences in the last three months.

Results show that the customer-sales associate relationship significantly reduces customers’ attitude toward searching offline but purchasing online. Receptiveness to online store shopping has significant effects on customers’ attitude toward multichannel shopping behaviors regardless of whether they search or purchase via the online channel. The customer-sales associate relationship also moderates the relationship between customers’ receptiveness to online store shopping and multichannel shopping behaviors. Finally, unlike other types of online and offline multichannel shoppers who display higher future spending intentions when the physical store decides to open an online store, those who prefer physical stores for both information searching and product purchasing display lower spending intentions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to use customer-sales associate relationships to investigate consumers’ attitude toward multichannel shopping behavior. The findings provide meaningful implications for service providers that use sales associates to increase consumers’ value via face-to-face service, but find it challenging to go online.

To date, most research focused on understanding the meanings and mechanism of gift giving behavior and there is little literature on channel usage behavior for gift shopping. The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between consumers' retail purchase experiences for their own use and their gift shopping for others in a multichannel retail context.

Using a self‐administered survey method, the paper obtained 171 usable responses from females in a large US Midwestern University. Data are analyzed employing descriptive statistics, correlation analysis, and structural equation modeling.

The findings of this paper showed that for all five retail channels (i.e. internet, mail‐order catalog, TV shopping, local stores, and non‐local stores), there are significant and positive relationships between consumers' product purchase experiences for their own use and their gift purchase experiences. Managerial and theoretical implications are provided.

Limitations of the present study include sampling, which prevent the generalization of results to all gift shoppers, and gift product categories focus on in the present study.

As little is known about the consumer gift shopping behavior in a multichannel retail environment, the study provides valuable strategy for multichannel retailers.

Innovations in technology and evolution of internet elicited the usage of technology and internet during the shopping process of consumers. Changes in consumer shopping processes opened doors for shifts in consumer buying behavior. As a result of the variations in consumer buying behavior, retailers formed new channel structures to fulfill customer requirements. New channel structures created different retailing formats and enhanced the complexity of retailing processes. As the complexity of retailing processes increased, complexity of consumer shopping behavior increased as well. In this sense, multichannel retailing emerged and expanded all around the world and paved the way for omnichannel retailing. Transformation of multichannel retailing to omnichannel retailing created two different shopping forms as: Showrooming and Webrooming. In this chapter, showrooming and webrooming concepts will be studied and the complementarity dimensions of these concepts will be explained in detail.

The purpose of this paper is to explore how consumers respond to price promotions in stores and on internet channels during a holiday season. Since holiday shopping has long been considered promotion intensive and multichannel shopping is increasing, it is important to understand whether consumers respond differently to price promotions from these two different channels. The paper aims to examine whether the extent of price promotions that consumers perceive in online and offline channels and their sensitivity to such price promotions influences their holiday spending in each channel.

A public telephone survey was conducted to collect data during the month of December 2006. Using random sampling in Florida, a total of 501 responses were collected.

Overall, the findings support the effectiveness of price promotions during holiday periods. Such awareness of the extensive practice of price promotions at stores can encourage holiday spending offline; additionally, sensitivity to price promotions on the internet can be transferred into increased holiday spending online.

The results of this paper extend knowledge of how holiday price promotions affect consumer spending and provide important insights into how retailers should develop price promotion programs that are well tailored to consumer behaviors in different channels.

This paper addresses an untapped issue on how price promotions are perceived in multichannel holiday shopping contexts.

The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of psychological traits and shopping environmental factors on impulse buying tendency via television shopping programs and to reflect the inherent nature of the impulsive television shopping environment in the USA as well as the traditional retail channel.

A total of 154 questionnaires were returned from multichannel customers who purchased apparel from television shopping programs and traditional retail stores.

Five causal relationships among impulse buying and interaction tendencies in both television and retail settings and TV shopping program browsing duration proposed in this study were confirmed through structural equation modeling.

This study adds valuable empirical findings to the literature on the distribution channel relationship by examining buying behavior of multichannel customers as well as some theoretical implications for impulse buying‐related theories.

This study provides insights for customer impulse buying behavior in the multiple shopping environments.

Consumer purchasing behaviour has changed substantially in the light of recent developments in E-commerce. So-called “multichannel customers” tend to switch retail channels during the purchasing process. In order to address changing consumer behaviour, multichannel fashion retailing companies must continue to learn how to provide excellent service to such customers. The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the interpretation of multichannel service quality by explaining it from the perspective of the so-called “multichannel customers”.

Drawing on social influence theory, this paper aims to investigate these issues from the perspective of multichannel customers. In contrast with dualist and objectivist studies, this paper uses a constructivist epistemology and ethnographic methodology. Such an approach is associated with an interpretivist ontological worldview, which postulates the existence of “multiple realities”. The sample size for this research consisted of 34 in-depth interviews and 2 focus groups comprising 10 focus group participants.

The data analysis fundamentally found that multichannel customers tended to continually adjust choices regarding retailer and retail ckhannel when making purchases. The perspective of this paper is different from mainstream positivist service quality research which sees service quality as static, objectively measurable and dualistic. As an alternative, this paper acknowledges service quality as a dynamic, subjective and pluralistic phenomenon.

This paper contributes to the interpretation of multichannel service quality with a new concept that explains the phenomenon from the perspective of customers and thus considers it necessary for multichannel retailers to adopt strategies relating to customers’ changing behaviour.

With India becoming world’s second largest user of smartphones (Ming, 2017) and with more users adopting mobile devices for online shopping, Indian online retailers now have to manage mobile channel in addition to existing traditional channel (of computers). Hence, the purpose of this study is to investigate the mapping of product characteristics with individual channel capabilities and its effect on online consumer behaviour, so that e-tailers can create enhanced online shopping experience for consumers.

A comprehensive research model is developed on the basis of the knowledge gained from multichannel retailing and e-commerce literature. Then, the model is empirically tested, with primary data collected from 344 customers, using structural equation modelling. The data are collected from customers across two product categories: electronics and fashion.

The results reveal that perceived usefulness, perceived risk and perceived self-efficacy are important drivers of online consumer behaviour for continued usage. The multi-group analysis confirms the moderation influence of platform type for some relationships across electronics and fashion.

The findings underline the importance of multichannel complementarity across electronics and fashion. The preference of mobile devices for fashion and traditional devices such as computers for electronics provides valuable insights for online retailers towards management of multichannel e-commerce ecosystem.

In Indian context, this is the first empirical research on online multichannel retail setting, studying the impact of diverse channel formats on different product categories. The study’s findings give empirical basis to online retailers to look out for right product–channel fit strategy for engaging consumers in the long run.

Webrooming (i.e. searching information online and making the final purchase in a physical store) has become a popular shopping practice, but remains insufficiently studied. To address this, a research framework encompassing online and offline channel attributes (i.e. online review diagnosticity, online search convenience, expected price loss, offline purchase effort and offline after-sales service convenience), consumer traits (i.e. anticipated regret) and shopping experience (i.e. smart-shopping perception) as determinants of webrooming continuance intention is proposed.

The proposed model was validated by conducting a questionnaire-based survey that yielded 354 useable responses. The data was subjected to partial least squares structural equation modelling and importance-performance map analysis.

According to the obtained results, online review diagnosticity, offline after-sales service convenience and anticipated regret are the vital antecedents of webrooming continuance intention, while smart-shopping perception acts as the mediator.

The current study adds significantly to the body of knowledge about webrooming by validating the inter-relationships between online review diagnosticity, after-sales service convenience, anticipated regret, smart-shopping perception and webrooming continuance intention.