Showrooming : a look into the Portuguese electronics market

• Autor(a) principal: Borges, Ricardo Miguel Filipe
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/25406
• topic: Online; Offline; Decision-making; Multi-channel shopping; Showrooming; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

The Internet made information widely available to every person with a connection. Furthermore, the increasing popularity of tablets and smartphones in the 2000s made the Internet connection more accessible and mobile. Nowadays, the combination of the facilitated access to the Internet and the growing number of online retailers generates transparency on the consumers’ minds that wasn’t possible before. We can check the price of an iPhone on a country on the other side of the world just by tapping a few times on the screen. Therefore, there’s a risk that brick-and-mortar stores turn into showrooms as consumers use them to see and touch the products but they never actually make the purchase offline. Although online vs. offline behavior has been widely studied in the past, the research about showrooming is insufficient. Plus, showrooming has many times been addressed from a negative standpoint, where authors try to identify and quantify the adverse effects for retailers.