More and more grocery retailers are becoming multi-channel retailers, as they are opening an online alternative next to their traditional offline supermarkets. While the number of multi-channel grocery shoppers is also expanding at a fast growth rate, there are still large differences in online shopping frequency, and as a result, in the levels of experience with buying in the online grocery channel. This study wants to (i) identify the underlying drivers of online store choice and (ii) explore if and how these drivers change when multi-channel shoppers gain online grocery shopping experience. We investigate this question with an online store choice model using purchase data of an extensive UK household panel over a two-year period, covering all multi-channel retailers in the grocery market. Our results show that multi-channel shoppers, at the start of online grocery shopping, tend to select the online store belonging to the same chain as their preferred offline store, especially when the online store is strongly integrated with the offline store in terms of assortment. When online grocery shopping experience increases, multi-channel shoppers' focus shifts from a comparison within a chain across channels to a comparison across chains within the online channel, resulting in an increasing importance of online assortment attractiveness and online loyalty when choosing an online store.

The large majority of online grocery shoppers are multichannel shoppers, who keep visiting offline grocery stores to combine convenience advantages of online shopping with selfservice advantages of offline stores. An important retail management question, therefore, is how these consumers divide grocery purchases across the retailer's online and offline channel. We provide a comprehensive analysis of the impact of category characteristics on the allocation pattern of multichannel grocery shoppers, and find that category allocation decisions are not only affected by marketing mix differences between the online and offline channel, but also by intrinsic category characteristics like perceived purchase risk and shopping convenience. In addition, we examine the effect of online buying experience. In line with expectations, we find that it can affect allocation patterns in different ways: (i) it attenuates the perceived risk of buying sensory categories online, thereby reducing differences in online category share, (ii) it reinforces marketing mix (assortment) effects, thereby making online category share differences more pronounced, and (ii) it has no effect for factors such as promotions that are easy to evaluate without experience, thereby leaving the online category share stable. In addition to different experience effects across allocation factors, we also observe variations in experience effects across consumer segments.

Despite the growing literature on loyalty program (LP) research, many questions remain underexplored. Driven by advancements in information technology, marketing analytics, and consumer interface platforms (e.g., mobile devices), there have been many recent developments in LP practices around the world. They impose new challenges and create exciting opportunities for future LP research. The main objective of this paper is to identify missing links in the literature and to craft a future research agenda to advance LP research and practice. Our discussion focuses on three key areas: (1) LP designs, (2) Assessment of LP performance, and

University for their valuable input. Yuxin Chen served as associate editor for this article. Jie Zhang and els Breugelmans*The authors conduct an empirical investigation of a new retail loyalty program (lP), called an item-based loyalty program (iBlP), in which price discounts are replaced by reward point promotions that need to be accumulated and redeemed later. The main objective is to examine its impact on various aspects of consumer purchase behavior and a retailer's sales revenue. They find that after a retailer switched from a conventional lP to the iBlP, consumers became more responsive to reward point promotions than to price discounts of the same monetary value, were no longer responsive to competitors' reward point promotions, and exhibited stronger cumulative reward point effects. in addition, the new lP had a significantly different impact on "current" lP members and nonmembers (defined by their status right before the switch), resulting in decreased (increased) total spending by the former (latter) group, under the retailer's current promotion practice. Furthermore, it is critically important for retailers to offer sufficient promotions under the new lP to achieve its full potential; otherwise, they risk alienating their loyal customers. Finally, the iBlP reduced attrition among existing customers and attracted more new customers, which contributed to most of the retailer's sales revenue gain after adopting the iBlP.