The Impact of Webrooming on High‐Involvement Purchase Decisions: Moderating Role of Transaction Utility Perception

ABSTRACT Webrooming—searching online before purchasing offline—has become common in high‐involvement purchase contexts, such as when buying expensive, infrequent, or complex products. Although firms often invest in digital channels to support this process, research has not established whether more information always improves decision‐making. This study integrates information processing theory and expectation confirmation theory. It analyzes transaction data from over 200,000 online‐offline journeys on a leading Chinese real estate platform, supplemented by semi‐structured interviews with homebuyers and sales managers. The pattern in these data is consistent with a self‐reinforcing cycle in which cognitive overload and affective confirmation failure compound one another, ultimately coinciding with weaker purchase decisions. This negative association is most pronounced in asymmetric channel intensity configurations (low online search, high offline experience). Perceived transaction utility further emerges as a contingent moderator that asymmetrically moderates the online and offline stages. By shifting the analytical focus from whether channels are integrated to how their intensities are configured, these findings suggest that the performance implications of webrooming are configurational and non‐monotonic, depending on the balance between online preparation and offline exposure, and thereby help reconcile prior inconsistencies in webrooming research. Accordingly, the study refines both IPT and ECT by revealing new boundary conditions and failure modes.