The impact of the introduction and use of an informational website on offline customer buying behavior

a r t i c l e i n f o Keywords: Informational website Online and offline behavior Decomposition Do customers increase or decrease their spending in response to the introduction of an informational website? To answer this question, this study considers the effects of the introduction and use of an informational website by a large national retailer on offline customer buying behavior. More specifically, we study a website's effects on the number of shopping trips and the amount spent per category per shopping trip. The model is calibrated through the estimation of a Poisson model (shopping trips) and a type-II tobit model (the amount spent per category per shopping trip), with effect parameters that vary across customers. For the focal retailer, an informational website creates more bad than good news; most website visitors engage in fewer shopping trips and spend less in all product categories. The authors also compare the characteristics of shoppers who exhibit negative website effects with those few shoppers who show positive effects and thus derive key implications for research and practice. Virtually every company offers information through its website, and most of these websites enable customers to buy online as well., websites can be classified as either informational or transactional; an informational website offers commercial information but does not allow customers to make purchases online, whereas a transactional website does. Most academic research into the effectiveness of websites focuses on the impact of transactional websites (e. reality, many firms maintain websites without transaction function-ality, such as Zara, Bailey, Banks and Biddle, Dollar General, IKEA Netherlands, and the major electronics department store MediaMarkt in several European countries. Therefore, we address customer responses to the introduction and use of an informational website that supports an existing bricks-and-mortar retailer that does not have a transactional website. When an online information search leads to a purchase decision, customers can conduct that purchase in various ways. First, they might buy the product from the website on which they found the information, assuming that the site allows them to do so. Such behavior is still relatively exceptional; online conversion rates rarely exceed 5% and are often much less (Moe & Fader, 2004). Second, customers may decide to leave the site and buy the product at a competitor's website (i.e., " free riding, " Huang, Lurie, & Mitra, 2009). Third, online search might precede offline purchase, an option that is especially likely …