Understanding consumers' showrooming behaviour: a stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) perspective

Abstract

<jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Purpose</jats:title><jats:p>The present piece of research aims at enhancing our understanding of situational and intentional showrooming behaviour. The study further tests and validates a model based on the stimulus–organism–response framework to draw richer insights.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Design/methodology/approach</jats:title><jats:p>The study adopts a two-phased approach to discover the consumers' rationale behind showrooming. In the first phase, a narrative-based examination followed by an inductive thematic analysis was employed. In the second phase, the stimulus–organism–response model was validated through structural equation modelling method.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Findings</jats:title><jats:p>The results of the study highlighted the factors that contribute to intentional and situational showrooming behaviour. Results show that consumers also showroom on account of situational circumstances such as assortment issues, poor sales-staff assistance and long payment queues at offline stores. However, intentional showroomers are primarily driven by perceived showrooming value which emerges as a combination of in-store search value and online purchase value. Past showrooming experience also plays a role in stimulating consumers to showroom. The results also revealed the moderating impact of product involvement and perceived product type, barring time pressure. The impact of showrooming self-efficacy was also observed.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Research limitations/implications</jats:title><jats:p>The study majorly validates the factors stimulating intentional showrooming conduct intertwined with product-related factors, time pressure and showrooming self-efficacy. Hence, the future scope of the study lies in quantitatively validating the findings concerning situational showroomers as this would help draw richer insights.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Practical implications</jats:title><jats:p>The findings of the study can be utilized by both offline and online retailers for managing showroomers.</jats:p></jats:sec><jats:sec><jats:title content-type="abstract-subheading">Originality/value</jats:title><jats:p>The study offers rich insights on showrooming which has been identified as a major challenge being faced by offline retailers nowadays.</jats:p></jats:sec>

Cruising down millennials’ fashion runway: a cross-functional study beyond Pacific borders

“…Such establishment would subsequently affect their response in consumption intention. Notably, the proven model has reflected the frameworks by Arora et al (2020) and Kü hn and Petzer (2018) in identifying consumers' perception (i.e. clothing interest) in the "Organism" role.…”

“…Nonetheless, multiple studies have often identified one's psychological perspective in the role of the "organism", where it precedes consumption responses, while being directly influenced by external stimulus (Aggarwal and Rahul, 2017;Arora et al, 2020;Kü hn and Petzer, 2018). In this regard, elements including usefulness, information quality, virtual presentations and physical experience are shown to be the stimulus that develop consumers' conception in the forms of trust, satisfaction and perceived value, which in turn, affect their consumption intention.…”

The mediating effect of consumer empowerment in omni-channel retailing

“…S-O-R framework, used to explain consumer behaviour in this study, is extensively used in the context of retailing. The studies in retailing provide insights for different external environment factors as stimuli ( S ), such as social presence (Wang et al , 2019), website quality (Jiyoung and Lennon, 2013), ambient and design (Chang et al , 2011), brand familiarity (Kaur et al , 2017), showrooming shopping value (Arora et al , 2020) and channel integration (Zhang et al , 2018). The impact of external states on the organism relates to in the inner feelings of the consumers.…”

Investigation of consumers' cross‐channel switching intentions: A push‐pull‐mooring approach

“…Hence, they utilise the interaction with salespersons and examine products in stores (Schneider & Zielke, 2020). While they enjoy the benefits of searching offline, showroomers finally choose to purchase online due to price‐related benefits such as discounts (Arora, Parida, & Sahney, 2020).…”

“…They also exhibit increased cognitive effort towards search (Zha, Li, & Yan, 2013). Previous research shows that consumers who engage in showrooming and webrooming seek more information to reduce pre‐purchase uncertainty and post‐purchase regret (Arora et al, 2020; Flavián et al, 2016). These consumers exhibit high levels of multichannel self‐efficacy (Arora et al, 2017; Arora & Sahney, 2017).…”