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. (c) 2007 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.