Deciphering in-store-online switching in multi-channel retailing context: Role of affective commitment to purchase situation

摘要

Customers today make a trade-off between online and offline channels to purchase fashion items. The purpose of this research is to examine whether affective commitment to a purchase situation impacts consumers' channel choice (online store or in-store) for fashion purchases. Two between-subjects' experimental studies were designed to test hypotheses. Binary logistics regression, chi-square test, two-way ANOVA and PROCESS Macro were used to test hypotheses. The findings of study 1 showed that in a high affectively committed purchase situations, consumers prefer to purchase fashion items in-store whereas in low affectively committed purchase situations, they prefer online. Further, hedonic benefits mediate the association between affective commitment and channel selection. Study 2 re-confirmed the findings of study 1 and showed that customer channel choice varies between high and low affective commitment levels depending on customer innovation seeking tendency. This study enriches the multi-channel literature and provide several implications to multi-channel fashion retailers.