Challenge of Understanding Multichannel Customer Behavior in 21st Century: A Meta-analysis

Abstract

The purposes of this study are to provide comprehensive reviews on multichannel consumer behaviors published in peer-reviewed academic journals from 2005 to 2014, to develop a conceptual framework that demonstrates multichannel determinants such as psychographics, demographics, social influences, and situational factors on consumers' search and purchase behavior based on customers' profits or costs judgment, and to provide possible direction for future research in multichannel consumer behavior. Three steps were taken in the process of analyzing consumers' channel determinants presented in the 37 studies, and 12 most frequently used factors that appear in the studies were extracted. These factors include convenience, service, trust/risk, saving money, product knowledge, experience, efficacy/usefulness, involvement, shopping environment/situation factors, demographics, product types, and social influence. With 12 determinants of multichannel consumers' search and purchase behavior, a conceptual framework was proposed based on expectancy theory. The directions for future research were also discussed.