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This study analyzes how omnichannel integration influences customer patronage intention, highlighting the moderation effect of consumer service experience consciousness. Additionally, it also examines the sequential mediating role of consumer empowerment and satisfaction.

This study uses a survey method to collect data from 336 young Indian consumers, having experienced omnichannel retailing. Data were analyzed using SPSS PROCESS macro to examine both the mediating and moderated relationships.

The results confirm that a customers' perceived online–offline channel integration increases their patronage intention directly and through the mediating role of consumer empowerment and satisfaction. Additionally, as a moderator, consumer service experience consciousness does not necessarily impact consumer patronage interest through the mediating role of consumer empowerment. Nevertheless, it does have a negative impact through the mediating role of consumer satisfaction.

This study provides insights into designing online–offline retailing integration, based upon which, proposes several recommendations for increasing customer satisfaction and patronage intention.

To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is among the first studies to highlight the theory of consumer empowerment in the context of omnichannel retailing. Thus, it contributes to the extant literature on omnichannel retailing while investigating the moderating role of consumer service experience consciousness.

Qualitative research has made important contributions to social science by enabling researchers to engage with people and get an in-depth understanding of their views, beliefs and perceptions about social phenomena. With new and electronically mediated forms of human interaction (e.g. the online world), there are new opportunities for researchers to gather data and participate with or observe people in online groups. The purpose of this paper is to present features, challenges and possibilities for online ethnography as an innovative form of qualitative research.

Ethnography is about telling a story about what happens in a particular setting or settings. In order to do this online, it is important to revisit, adopt and adapt some ideas about traditional (offline) ethnography. The paper distinguishes online ethnography from other types of research. It draws some generic features of online ethnography and identifies challenges for it. With these ideas in mind the paper presents and provides a reflection of an online ethnography of software developers.

Online ethnography can provide valuable insights about social phenomena. The paper identifies generic features of this approach and a number of challenges related to its practice. These challenges have to do with to the choice of settings, use of online data for research, representation of people and generation of valuable and useful knowledge. The paper also highlights issues for future consideration in research and practice.

The ethnography helped the researcher to identify and address a number of methodological challenges in practice and position herself in relation to relevant audiences she wanted to speak to. The paper also suggests different orientations to online ethnography. Lessons learned highlight potential contributions as well as further possibilities for qualitative research in the online world.

Online ethnography offers possibilities to engage with a global audience of research subjects. For academics and practitioners the paper opens up possibilities to use online tools for research and it shows that the use of these tools can help overcome difficulties in access and interaction with people and to study a diversity of research topics, not only those that exist online. The paper offers guidance for researchers about where to start and how to proceed if they want to conduct online ethnography and generate useful and valuable knowledge in their area of interest.

The purpose of this study is to develop new frameworks for operations strategy and service system design in electronic commerce (EC) to provide strategic insights to academics and practitioners.

Product/service process matrices for intangible and tangible products in EC operations are presented based on the classification of products and delivery channel options and three cases are investigated to illustrate the newly developed matrices.

The fit between two dimensions (characteristics of product/service, service delivery processes) in the matrices contributes to firm's competitiveness through market expansion and improvement of customer services. Through the case studies, it was confirmed that the conceptual framework developed in this study illustrates actual EC operations well.

Further case or empirical research on more diverse products or services will be required to increase robustness of the matrices and to additionally confirm the results of this study including the effects of the “fit”.

The new frameworks have the potential to be useful as a planning tool in developing an operations strategy and service system design, as well as a diagnostic tool for examining the causes of poor service quality and low customer satisfaction resulting from a mismatch between two dimensions.

The development of new frameworks is an important first step in the gradual process of theory building and theory testing, as well as providing strategic insights for practitioners.

This paper introduces two methodological innovations for qualitative research. We apply these innovations to holistically understand youth peer cultures and improve participant-driven qualitative methodology.

It moves the methodological frontier forward by blending technology with the “go-along” approach used by ethnographers to prioritize participants’ perspectives and experiences within their socio-cultural contexts.

We introduce the youth-centered and participant-driven virtual tours, including a neighborhood tour using Google Maps designed to explore how youth navigate their socio-spatial environments (n = 64; 10–17 year-olds; 2013) and a social media tour designed to explore how youth navigate their networked publics (n = 50; 10–17 year-olds; 2013), both in relation to their local peer cultures.

Applicable to a wide range of research populations, the Google Maps tour and the social media tour give the qualitative researcher additional tools to conduct participant-driven research into youths’ socio-cultural worlds. These two innovations help to address challenges in youth research as well as qualitative research more broadly. We find, for example, that the “go-along” aspect of the virtual tour minimizes the perceived threat of the researcher’s adult status and brings youth participants’ perspectives and experiences to the center of inquiry in the study of local peer cultures.

Sporting goods retailing is a significant sector within the sport industry with the total revenue of this sector reaching $52.2 billion in 2018. Beset with formidable competition, sporting goods stores are compelled to augment their merchandise with service and improve retail quality. The purpose of this study is to investigate retail quality of sporting goods stores (RQSGS).

Based on 27,793 online reviews of 1481 stores in the United States, this study used Leximancer 4.0, a text mining software, to identify critical retail quality dimensions associated with sporting goods stores, and further explored the most salient dimensions among different levels of ratings.

Customer service and store aspects are the two higher-order dimensions of RQSGS; holistic experience, manager and staff are three themes under customer service, and product, B&M store and online–offline integration are three themes under store aspects. Furthermore, extreme reviews focus more on customer service, whereas lukewarm reviews focus more on store aspects.

Knowledgeable staff, managers and online–offline integration are instrumental in creating superior retail quality. Sporting goods stores should enhance hedonic and social values for consumers in order to ward off online competitions.

This study explored retail quality dimensions that are pertinent to sporting goods retailing utilizing text mining methods. This study to certain extent cross-validated the existing retailing literature that is developed on alternative methods.

This paper aims to review the latest management developments across the globe and pinpoint practical implications from cutting-edge research and case studies.

This briefing is prepared by an independent writer who adds their own impartial comments and places the articles in context.

Businesses that use omnichannel retailing will access a larger audience, streamline customer-oriented business routines, better understand customer behavior and most effectively use business resources.

The briefing saves busy executives, strategists and researchers hours of reading time by selecting only the very best, most pertinent information and presenting it in a condensed and easy-to-digest format.

Plugging into the multimodal aesthetics of youth lifestreaming, this article examines how three lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and/or queer (LGBTQ) youths use digital media production as an activist practice toward cultural justice work. Focusing on the queer rhetorical dimensions of multimodal (counter)storytelling, the communicative practice used to (re)name, remix and challenge epistemic notions of objective reality, this paper aims to highlight how youth worked to (de)compose and (re)author multiple identities and social relationships across online/offline contexts.

Through sustained participant observation across online/offline contexts, active interviewing techniques and visual discourse analysis, this paper illuminates how composing with digital media was leveraged by three LGBTQ youths to navigate larger systems of inequality across a multi-year connective ethnographic study.

By highlighting how queer rhetorical arts were used as tools to surpass and navigate social fault lines created by difference, findings highlight how Jack, Andi and Gabe, three LGBTQ youths, used multimodal (counter)storytelling to comment, correct and compose being different. Speaking across the rhetorical dimensions of logos, pathos and ethos, the author contends that a queer rhetorics lens helped highlight how youth used the affordances of multimodal (counter)storytelling to lifestream versions of activist selves.

Reading LGBTQ youths’ lifestreaming as multimodal (counter)storytelling, this paper highlights how three youths use multimodal composition as entry points into remixing the radical present and participate in cultural justice work.

The purpose of this paper is to review and extend previous work involving branding and website performance and aesthetics by applying a best-worst scaling (BWS) approach. Respondents were tasked with choosing the best and worst from 16-brand attribute statements representing website communications and aesthetics, a more effective understanding of consumer segmentation is revealed between the offline facility to the online retail experience.

A research design utilising BWS was deployed to provide an alternate perspective of consumer choice in an omni-channel retail environment.

Findings indicate a bifurcated audience with one-half reliant on communication and the other half on aesthetics is most important in the online environment when generating a positive relationship towards the retail brand.

This study was conducted within a single retail format category (sportswear and apparel) so future studies need to estimate cross-category implications. The authors also suggest online experimental designs for consumers to compare traditional retail brand images. Finally as this study utilised Australian responses only the authors suggest cross-cultural comparisons to better understand the universal nature of website functionality and its link with traditional retail formats.

Retail executives will find the results from this study useful in two ways. To ensure consistency of brand image across channels managers must communicate efficiently and effectively. Brand managers must mediate between customer segments with some preferring clear concise website communications and others well established aesthetics.

This study adopts a BWS approach to better understand consumer choices in an online/offline branding environment.

Because of its omission of social influences, conventional animosity research has failed to sufficiently consider consumption context. To address this limitation, this research constitutes two interrelated parts: (a) investigating how normative influences (value-expressive and utilitarian influences) shape consumers’ animosity attitudes and purchase intentions; and (b) building on the normative influence perspective and separating consumption context into purchase (online vs. offline) and usage (private vs. public) contexts. The goal was to examine under the condition of preference conflict, how consumption contexts with different degrees of behavioral exposure affect purchase decisions.

One pretest, one survey and one experiment were conducted to empirically validate the proposed research model.

In an international crisis, consumers’ attitudes and behaviors were socially determined. Moreover, the online purchase with private usage (offline purchase with public usage) condition resulted in the highest (lowest) level of purchase intention.

This research pioneers in the animosity literature to identify the possibility of preference conflict in a situational international crisis, and to more delicately separate the conventional consumption context into purchase and usage contexts.