【公开学术报告】】The Impact of Mobile-app Adoption on Grocery-purchase Behaviour

Topic: The Impact of Mobile-app Adoption on Grocery-purchase Behaviour

Date & Time: 9:30-11:00am, Thur. 25^th, October 2018

Venue: Room 2101, Tongji Building A

Language: English

Speaker：Dr. Boram Lim (University of Texas at Dallas)

ABSTRACT

We empirically map consumer responses to the introduction of a mobile application in two existing channels (online and offline) by using a unique dataset from a major Korean grocery retailer. We first investigate the changes in households’ channel-usage patterns and examine the cannibalization of the new mobile channel on existing channels. Furthermore, we evaluate changes in households’ weekly expenditures upon adoption of the mobile app. In particular, we decompose the expenditure change due to mobile-app adoption into a change in the frequency of shopping trips and basket size. We find that introducing the mobile channel cannibalizes the online channel, but the impact on the offline channel is quite small. As households adopt the mobile application, they increase their weekly expenditure on average by 16.5%, due primarily to the higher frequency of shopping trips rather than the larger basket size. We also find considerable heterogeneity in the impact of mobile adoption across consumer segments with differing shopping habits before the mobile introduction. Online-only shoppers and hybrid (online and offline) shoppers showed modest increases in their expenditure and little or no change in their channel-usage pattern. However, offline-only shoppers who adopted the mobile channel quickly started to embrace the online channel via the mobile app and increased their weekly expenditure by 43.1%. We also find a significantly stronger effect of mobile adoption for households who used the grocery chain relatively less often. Given the fact that we find little change in average grocery spending per household during the period, our results suggest mobile apps can be a competitive tool to induce business switching and therefore increase market share for a grocery chain.

Keywords: Mobile shopping channel; Shopping channel introduction; Multichannel marketing; Retailing