Abstract
Loneliness has spread globally and the COVID-19 outbreak has boosted the number of lonely consumers. The retail industry and its consumptions channels have changed dramatically since the pandemic and helped consumers resist loneliness. Faced by multiple channel choices, how consumers' loneliness affects their channel preferences is a contemporary issue that needs to be addressed. By introducing protection motivation theory, logit model, and maximum likelihood estimation, we find that consumers' perceived vulnerability to loneliness and their self-efficacy towards online shopping are the main factors influencing channel preference. Additionally, their negative attitude towards online shopping mediates the effect of perceived vulnerability on channel preference. Simultaneously, the perceived vulnerability and severity caused by loneliness improve consumers' negative attitudes towards online shopping. The results show that retailers need to pay attention to the differentiated layouts of diverse shopping channels, improve the communication skills of retail service personnel, strengthen the integration of online and offline channels, and pay more attention to the treatment and compensation of bad online shopping experience.
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