Challenges in Omnichannel Business
(A2020-59732)

AUTHORS

Maarten Gijsenberg, University of Groningen

ABSTRACT

This session addresses 4 challenges firms may face in omnichannel business. They range from tactical – promotions and opportunistic product returns – over more strategic – adding a retail channel, forced channel migration of customers – to the most fundamental omnichannel question – to be or not to be omnichannel. Insights come from a diverse set of rich data from both retail and services, thus acknowledging that omnichannel is now a widely prevalent business model. 1. Promoting Returns? Side-Effects of Price Discounts on Customer Purchase and Return Behavior Christian Hirche, Tammo Bijmolt, Maarten Gijsenberg This study addresses opportunistic product returns: returns by customers who bought a product just before a discount was offered in order to re-purchase it at the lower, discounted price. It provides insights on cross-product opportunistic returns, promotion depth influence, opportunistic return prevalence across product categories, and customer learning effects. 2. The Impact of Adding a Brick-And-Mortar Brand Store on the Performance of the Manufacturer’s Online Webshop and Multi-Brand Retail Stores Michiel van Crombrugge, Els Breugelmans, Florian Breiner, Christian Schreiner This paper investigates the impact of opening a brand store by a manufacturer on its own online channel sales, and on partner retailer channel sales. It decomposes online sales changes in first time/repeat online customers changes, in online order frequency/size changes and shows how the online order composition changes. It also looks at net sales and profit implications for the manufacturer. 3. Forced Migration from Offline to Mobile and Online Channels, Its Impact on Churn, Channel Choice and Purchases: A Field Experiment Anastasia Dikareva-Brugman, Umut Konus, Jonne Guyt This study focusses on customer migration from offline to mobile channels, the latter currently being the main customer-firm service interface platform for many firms. It thereby specifically investigates how forced channel migration affects customer churn, channel choice and additional purchases in subsequent stages. Finally, it explores channel migration in an after-sales context in a contractual-services settings. 4. Should All Brands and Customers Be Multichannel? Development of a Brand, Customer, Channel taxonomy Lisan Lesscher, Lara Lobschat, Katherine Lemon, Peter Verhoef This paper investigates whether using multiple retail channels (by the brand or customer) is always more effective than a single channel strategy, and to what extent which type of channel (or channel combination) contributes to revenues across brands and customer loyalty tiers. It thereby develops a brand, customer and channel taxonomy, indicating which type of channel (or channel combination) works best for which customer-brand combination(s).