Showrooming, webrooming, and operational strategies for competitiveness. Issue 8 (5th June 2022)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Jiao, Chuanya; Hu, Bin
• Is Part Of: Production and operations management. Volume 31:Issue 8(2022)
• Page Start: 3217
• Page End: 3232
• Publication Date: 2022-06-05
• Subjects: decision tree -- free sampling -- in‐store research assistance -- reverse showrooming; Production management -- Periodicals; 658.505
• DOI: 10.1111/poms.13747
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1059-1478

Abstract

Abstract: 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.