How does shopping duration evolve and influence buying behavior? The role of marketing and shopping environment

Abstract

This study investigates how promotional activities, mall size, and past shopping experiences affect customer shopping duration, and elucidates how shopping duration induces immediate, transient, and long-term effects on customer decisions of whether and how much to buy in the offline shopping mall format. We simultaneously model purchase incidence, purchase amount, and shopping duration to examine empirically the constructs’ dynamic impacts. The proposed model is calibrated using six-year-long transaction data of 43,326 customers that patronize malls operated by a large retail firm. The results reveal that shopping duration leads to an immediate increase in the amount spent by customers in a given period. The transient effects of shopping duration on purchase incidence and amount are significantly positive. However, in the long term, while purchase frequency appears to increase with cumulative shopping duration, purchase amount is negatively affected. Further, shopping duration increases with the size of the mall visited and the level of promotion but tends to converge to a lower level in the long term. Managerial implications for effectively managing customer experience are discussed.