Consumer Decision Making in Omnichannel Environments

Abstract

Digitization has fundamentally changed consumers’ experiences of shopping. Our chapter provides a survey of consumers’ decision-making and experiences within the context of omnichannel retailing. Consumers nowadays find a number of channels that provide them with many search, comparison, and purchase choices as retailers seek to utilize both online and offline purchase channels strategically. Consumers have benefitted in particular from the opportunities offered by the Internet’s bidirectional quality, i.e. facilitating communication between companies and consumers as well as between consumers. We identify changing patterns of consumer behavior which suggest consumers increasingly pursue integrative (rather than different) purchasing strategies between online and offline settings. We trace changes that have flowed from the growth of the digital age (including within the classical stages of consumer behavior: search, choice, acquisition/purchase, consumption and use, and disposal). Drivers for consumer motivation, satisfaction, and experiences in omnichannel environments are reviewed as well as new developments which include different ways of communicating with and reaching consumers, varying channels of distribution, different consumer responses to shopping, and different patterns of consumer purchasing depending on the product category. The simultaneous use of multiple channels, which interact with each other, provides the context for our discussion of the factors that affect consumers’ decision-making and purchasing online and offline and consumers’ digital purchasing strategies.