CONSUMERS’ OMNICHANNEL JOURNEY: CHARACTERISTICS RELATION TO SHOWROOMING AND WEBROOMING

Contemporary consumer journey is not restricted to one channel anymore. Consumers move from online to physical and vice versa incessantly. The main aim of this study is to examine the showrooming and webrooming behaviors of consumers and the factors affecting these behaviors. Stemming from epistemic theory of curiosity, this study analyses curiosity as independent variable and two mediators; market mavenism and consumer innovativeness as consumer characteristics and two outcome variables showrooming behavior and actual webrooming behavior. In order to analyze the stated relationships through convenience sampling data was collected from 391 respondents. The data was analyzed by SMART PLS 4. The findings show curiosity has a positive relationship with all constructs. Market mavenism has significant positive relationship with both showrooming and webrooming. Consumer innovativeness is positively related to webrooming on the other hand, the relationship between consumer innovativeness and showrooming is not found to be significant. These results suggest innovative consumers differ on webrooming and showrooming behavior. The study makes new contributions to the literature on curiosity and consumer characteristics for webrooming and showrooming.