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Top1. Introduction
With the dawn of the mobile channel, tablets, social media, and the integration of these new channels in online and offline retailing, the retail landscape has been changed (Verhoef, Kannan and Inman, 2015). We are now moving from a multi-channel to an omni-channel retailing model (Rigby, 2011). In this environment, compared to the quality or price of goods, consumers are more concerned about high-quality pleasant purchasing experience in the whole process of shopping. Further, research has shown that purchasing experience has a strong impact on consumer evaluations and relative preferences (King and Balasubramanian, 1994). Past research about new retailing put forward that integrating online and offline business and combining with modern logistics factors to promote the rapid transformation of the retail industry (Zhao and Xu, 2017). In the omni-channel retailing, enterprises are required to sell products and provide services through the integration of offline channels, e-commerce channels and mobile e-commerce channels. In this context, enterprises must accurately grasp customer experience demand and cater to consumers’ need at any time, at any place and in any way to gain an advantage in the competition (Zhang et al., 2010). Therefore, these problems have attracted extensive attention in academia, and many researchers discussed and studied the factors including the channel choice, customer experience and consumer shopping stage.
Nikki (2011) believes that omni-channel retail should be “4P”-pick, pack, process, pay seamless integration, and finally achieve “buy anywhere, get anywhere”. Godfrey et al. (2011) believe that enterprises can interact with customers in a variety of ways, and use new tools to observe customer behaviors, so as to continue to innovate and improve retail services. All this is due to the integration of multiple retail channels and the emergence of a large number of new medias. Fulgoni (2014) analyzed the purchase path of consumers under the background of omni-channel, and expounded how the development of digital technology changes the way consumers make purchase decisions. The degree of consumers searching relevant information through the Internet before purchase is shocking.
However, in omni-channel retailing, some problems are highly regarded by marketing practitioners and academic researchers. These problems are, which experiences consumers care mostly during the whole shopping stage, and which channel do consumers select in different shopping stages? At present, the research in this aspect is sparse, thus the current research provided some contribution in this research field.
The structure of this paper is as follows: The second part is a literature review; the third part outlines the research hypotheses; the fourth part gives the empirical results and analysis; and the fifth part provides a conclusion and some implications.