An empirical study of the cross-channel effects between web and mobile shopping channels

With the increasing popularity of mobile applications, increasingly more e-commerce websites are providing mobile shopping services that enable their consumers to access their products and services through an additional mobile channel. The question arises here as to whether the new channel brings new sales or merely shifts consumers from the web to the mobile channel. Using the 2½-year transaction data obtained from an e-commerce company that expanded its web service onto a mobile platform, we investigated the impact of the newly introduced mobile channel on the sales of the incumbent web channel, and whether it could stimulate new consumption from consumers. Our empirical results indicate that after the adoption of the mobile channel, the purchases on the web channel were slightly cannibalized; however, the consumers’ purchases increased overall, suggesting that the positive synergy effect of the new channel overrode the negative cannibalization effect. Our investigation contributes to multichannel e-commerce literature by empirically testing the cross-channel effects of a new mobile channel and also providing insights for e-retailers interested in introducing a new mobile channel.