Disentangling the Impact of Omnichannel Integration Services on Consumer Behavior in Integrated Sales Channels

‘Brick-and-mortar’ retailers, when expanding their businesses to online channels, can either add a separate online channel or integrate channels to enhance service offerings. Although past studies on channel choice have yielded insights into factors affecting consumers’ channel preference, there is a dearth of research that sheds light on when and why massive investments into channel integration would be preferred over online optimizations. To this end, we construct and validate a theoretical model that posits omnichannel integration services for acquisition and recovery as predictors of consumers’ online channel preference through influ-encing their perceptions of convenience and risk. Our experimental study reveals how distinct configurations of cross-channel service offerings affect consumers’ channel evaluations and decisions, as well as how complementarities from channel integration across transaction and post-transaction phases can prevail over pure online substitutes. Consequently, this study bridges diagnostic and prescriptive research streams on multichannel and omnichannel retail by attesting to channel integration as a viable channel differentiator. From a practical stand-point, we compare twelve distinct channel configurations with regards to consumers’ core eval-uative criteria and highlight the value of omnichannel integration since efficiency improve-ments to the online channel can only serve as a partial substitute to channel integration.