Multichannel customer management: Understanding the research-shopper phenomenon

This paper develops and estimates a model for understanding the causes of research shopping, and investigates potential strategies for managing it. The research-shopper phenomenon is the tendency of customers to use one channel for search and another for purchase. We hypothesize three fundamental reasons for research shopping: (1) Attribute-based decision-making, (2) Lack of channel lock-in and (3) Cross-channel synergy. Our findings suggest all three mechanisms are at work in making Internet Search⇒Store Purchase the most popular form of research shopping. We illustrate how our methods could be used to simulate and evaluate various strategies for managing research shopping.