Situational variables in online versus offline channel choice

• Published in: Electronic commerce research and applications Vol. 12; no. 5; pp. 347 - 361
• Main Authors: Chocarro, Raquel, Cortiñas, Mónica, Villanueva, María-Luisa
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Amsterdam Elsevier B.V 01.09.2013; Elsevier BV
• Subjects: Channel choice; Consumer behavior; Electronic commerce; Experimentation; Internet; Retailing industry; Situational variables; Studies; United States > US; Experimentation; Channel choice; Situational variables; Internet
• ISSN: 1567-4223; 1873-7846
• DOI: 10.1016/j.elerap.2013.03.004

•We model the interaction between channel choice and the purchase situation.•We examine the moderating effect of product category.•Channel choice is more affected by physical situational variables.•The decision to purchase online is dependent on constraints in time availability.•Social interaction has opposite effects for low/high involvement categories. Since the advent and rapid diffusion of the Internet, the subject of consumer channel choice has attracted a large amount of research, mainly focused on the influence of channel, consumer and product category characteristics as its drivers. The interaction between channel choice and the purchase situation has been largely ignored, however. This paper is an attempt to fill this gap by identifying the key purchase situation variables and conducting an experiment to assess their impact on the choice between the traditional retail outlet and the online store. The results show that the key determinants of channel choice relate to time and distance. Distance-to-store and time pressures are among the factors affecting the probability of online purchase. Using a conceptual framework to explore differences in the impact of situational variables across product categories (high/low involvement, search/experience good), we show that distance-to-store has more influence on the likelihood of online purchase in situations involving search goods, while social variables are found to play a role only in the context of high-involvement goods.