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1. Introduction
In the changing retail landscape, multichannel retailing has become a hard reality. The increased intensity of competition and growing demands of customers has made it imperative for marketers to go multichannel. Owing to this, the last decade witnessed the proliferation of interaction touch points between consumers and marketers. Technological developments, multiplicity of channels and penetration of internet have empowered customers to utilize multiple channels in the single purchase process. Consumers can shop for products at any time in the seamless retail environment and this increased flexibility has made understanding the buying behaviour more complex and challenging. Customers often search products in one channel and buy from another (Verhoef et al., 2007; Shin, 2007) which has brought enormous challenges for retailers (Venkatesan et al., 2007). Researchers in the past have referred to such behaviour as “free riding behaviour” (Telser, 1960; Singley and Williams, 1995) and present day researchers are referring to it as “research shopper phenomenon” (Verhoef et al., 2007) or “hybrid shopping behaviour” (Kalyanam and Tsay, 2013). Whether it is an online store or a physical store, the customer is not bound to buy the product after taking pre-sales services like collecting product information, product demonstration, sales staff assistance and product diagnosticity, etc. Some customers take advantage of these services at a full service retailer and later buy from a lower priced retailer (Singley and Williams, 1995) or “an online store” leading to showrooming phenomenon as the multiple usage of channels helps consumers to reduce uncertainties in the buying processes (Flavián et al., 2016).
Kalyanam and Tsay (2013) have defined showrooming “as using the presentation and services offered by a brick-and-mortar channel but making the purchase in an online channel”. According to Statista (2014) reports, 62 per cent of shoppers in USA checked products offline before buying at an online store (D’Avanzo and Pilato, 2015). Van Baal and Dach (2005) reported that 26.4 per cent of respondents finalized transactions online after visiting the brick-and-mortar store. As per the DoubleClick (2004) reports as mentioned by Verhoef et al. (2007), 16 per cent of shoppers gathered information at physical stores before purchasing offline. Richter (2013) has claimed that 48 per cent of consumers use physical stores with “no plans of...