Click & Collect Retailing: A Study on Its Influence on the Purchase Intention of Customers

The retail sector, over the years, has evolved dramatically to provide better service to its customers. With the superior convenience of online shopping and tangible experience of in-store shopping, retail industries are looking forward to integrating both modes, thus embracing omni channel to provide better service to their customers. The prime objective of the research is to investigate the level of influence that using the Click & Collect online shopping mode can have on customer purchase intention and to ascertain the effects that online and offline shopping attributes have on this intention. The study emphasizes the usefulness of integrating both the shopping modes, thus embracing omni channel in the retail sector to provide a better shopping experience to the customers. The primary data were collected from 356 respondents.  Secondary data were collected by reviewing articles, research papers, extant studies and newspaper articles. In the analysis, the buying behaviour through an e-commerce platform and customers’ purchase intentions are taken as the dependent variable. Product risk, online trust, website quality, offline experience and perceived usefulness are identified as the independent variables. The data thus collected were processed for regression tests using IBM SPSS 25 software to analyse the results. The Stimulus-Organism-Response model was deployed as the proposed model for the research. The results obtained from the research will allow retailers to understand the customer's buying behaviour towards the new Click & Collect system better by identifying the key variables that influence their purchase intention.