تاثیر معرفی و استفاده از وب سایت اطلاعاتی در مورد رفتار خرید آفلاین مشتری

Do customers increase or decrease their spending in response to the introduction of an informational website? To answer this question, this study considers the effects of the introduction and use of an informational website by a large national retailer on offline customer buying behavior. More specifically, we study a website's effects on the number of shopping trips and the amount spent per category per shopping trip. The model is calibrated through the estimation of a Poisson model (shopping trips) and a type-II tobit model (the amount spent per category per shopping trip), with effect parameters that vary across customers. For the focal retailer, an informational website creates more bad than good news; most website visitors engage in fewer shopping trips and spend less in all product categories. The authors also compare the characteristics of shoppers who exhibit negative website effects with those few shoppers who show positive effects and thus derive key implications for research and practice.

Virtually every company offers information through its website, and most of these websites enable customers to buy online as well. According to extant categorizations (e.g., Lee and Grewal, 2004 and Teo and Pian, 2004), websites can be classified as either informational or transactional; an informational website offers commercial information but does not allow customers to make purchases online, whereas a transactional website does. Most academic research into the effectiveness of websites focuses on the impact of transactional websites (e.g., Moe and Fader, 2004 and Sismeiro and Bucklin, 2004). Yet, in reality, many firms maintain websites without transaction functionality, such as Zara, Bailey, Banks and Biddle, Dollar General, IKEA Netherlands, and the major electronics department store MediaMarkt in several European countries. Therefore, we address customer responses to the introduction and use of an informational website that supports an existing bricks-and-mortar retailer that does not have a transactional website. When an online information search leads to a purchase decision, customers can conduct that purchase in various ways. First, they might buy the product from the website on which they found the information, assuming that the site allows them to do so. Such behavior is still relatively exceptional; online conversion rates rarely exceed 5% and are often much less (Moe & Fader, 2004). Second, customers may decide to leave the site and buy the product at a competitor's website (i.e., “free riding,”Huang, Lurie, & Mitra, 2009). Third, online search might precede offline purchase, an option that is especially likely for search products (e.g., Alba and Lynch, 1997 and Weathers et al., 2007) and for customers with technology anxiety or trust issues (e.g. Hoffman et al., 1999 and Roy and Ghose, 2006). A majority of consumers still prefer to purchase in physical stores (i.e., 67%, Accenture, 2007) and use the Internet simply to gather information about product features and prices. That is, they prefer to research online and buy offline (Krillion, 2008 and Mendelsohn et al., 2006). Several studies investigate the effects of new Internet channels on either aggregate firm performance or individual customer behavior (for an overview, see Neslin & Shankar, 2009). Various studies indicate that at the aggregate level, the Internet channel rarely cannibalizes existing channels (e.g., Deleersnyder et al., 2002 and Geyskens et al., 2002), and the effects of an informational channel on performance may be positive (Lee & Grewal, 2004). At the individual customer level, research thus far has been able to determine only the effects of online transactional channels, which have emerged as both positive and negative (Ansari et al., 2008 and Kushwaha and Shankar, 2007). But what happens to individual purchase behavior if an organization starts to provide online information to customers? Visiting an informational website seemingly should induce customers to make more store visits and spend more money. However, we posit that the effect could be negative if the online information makes those customers (1) more efficient buyers, who make fewer shopping trips and fewer impulse purchases in the store and/or (2) more critical buyers, who use the information but buy from competitors or consider the information provided insufficient. Gensler et al., 2007 and Pauwels et al., 2011 also demonstrate that the effects of an additional transactional channel depend on the product category; certain product categories are more suitable for online buying than others. Yet no empirical results at the individual level reveal whether customers increase or decrease their spending across product categories over time as a result of their use of an informational website. In this study, we determine the effects of the introduction and usage of an informational website on purchases at the individual customer level. We relate the online search behavior of individual customers of a large retailer to their offline buying behavior using customer panel data that measure how often and how extensively customers visit the website over time, as well as how much and how often they shop at offline stores, and how much they spend in six different categories. We also study how offline buying behavior changes with the use of the website, using purchase data available for the periods before and after the implementation of the website. We decompose the amount of money spent by a customer in a certain time period into the number of shopping trips in that period and the amount spent per category per trip to answer the following questions: • Does the use of an informational website change the number of offline shopping trips conducted by individual customers? • Does the use of an informational website alter the purchase amounts of individual customers in different product categories? Our results show that the majority of registered website users engage in fewer shopping trips and spend less in all six product categories. Some consumers exhibit some positive behavioral effects, but overall, the effect is negative. In the remainder of this article, we begin by reviewing prior literature. After discussing the methodology, we describe the data. Then we present the findings and discuss them in light of previous studies. We end with a summary of the main conclusions and their implications.

For most customers, the introduction and use of a retailer's informational website has negative effects on the number of shopping trips they take, their decision to buy in a particular category, and the amount of money they spend across all six categories that we analyzed. Although we have no conclusive evidence, we consider several factors that might contribute to these negative results. First, customers exhibit more planned shopping behavior as consequence of their access to and use of more information. Second, the information on a website can be easily compared with information from competitive stores. Third, the quality of the website might also explain the negative effect. We discuss each of these explanations in more detail. Additional information leads to more planned behavior (Ajzen, 1991). As a consequence, consumers may reduce the number of visits to the store. With respect to the amount spent, being more informed about what they want might help consumers self-regulate better when they are in the store (Baumeister, 2002) and thus spend less money. While browsing the website, it is not possible to touch and feel the product, and such stimuli tend to induce impulse-buying behavior (Peck and Childers, 2006 and Rook, 1987; Rook & Hoch, 1985). According to Underhill (1999, p. 158), “almost all unplanned buying is a result of touching, hearing, smelling, or tasting something on the premises of the store.” When website users cannot approach the product, it may reduce their impulse buying and thus their spending. Shiv and Fedorikhin (1999) also indicate that in situations with scarce processing resources, more impulsive customers choose products on the basis of their spontaneous evoked affect rather than cognitions. Providing highly impulsive customers with an informational website, with which they can interact but not transact, puts them in a position from which they can engage sufficient processing resources, with more emphasis on cognition. Our findings indicate that, for customers who use the website, offline purchase incidence drops, as does spending in the store. Therefore, they should have fewer opportunities to choose products in response to the affect the products evoke as they walk through the store. Therefore, website visits may reduce impulse buying behavior in the physical store. Switching costs are very low in online environments. Competitors are just a click away, and psychological bonds are loose (e.g., Neslin et al., 2006). In this respect, we emphasize that one of the retailer's main competitors opened a website several months before the introduction of the website by the focal department store. The informational website offers information that can be compared easily with the information provided by competitors that also have informational or even transactional websites. After obtaining information on the website of the focal company, consumers may have an impulse to buy (Rook, 1987), but they can do so only on the competitors' transactional websites. Unfortunately, we did not observe whether customers actually make this switch, but Huang et al. (2009) find that this behavior is common among people who browse (transactional) websites. The extent to which customers appreciate the website also might help explain the behavior we observe. In the May 2002 survey we used to obtain the flow data, we also found, using five-point scales, that average customer satisfaction with the website was 3.43 and average satisfaction with the store was 3.78. The averages differ significantly from the neutral point of 3 (p < 0.001). However, because satisfaction figures are often skewed to the right ( Peterson & Wilson, 1992), we refrain from concluding that they are positive ratings. The average customer satisfaction measures do not differ significantly between users who were positively versus negatively influenced (p = 0.596 and 0.242, respectively, two-sided t-tests).