Why do consumers adopt online channel? An empirical investigation of two channel extension mechanisms

Abstract

As increasingly more organizations transit from a brick-and-mortar into a brick-and-click organization, consumers' embracing the new online channel is becoming critical to the success of these organizations. Although consumers' online channel adoption behavior has recently received a lot of attention, there still lacks a systematic investigation into the internal mechanism of consumers' channel adoption behaviors, especially, in an offline plus online channel context. Using brand extension theory and expectation-confirmation theory as the theoretical basis, this study examines what factors affect a consumer's decision on moving or extending from an offline channel to an online channel. A research model based on the above two theories is developed and empirically tested against data collected from 308 customers of a major commercial bank in China. The results confirm the usefulness of the two theories in explaining the online channel adoption and identify the concurrence effects of cross-channel synergies and dissynergies on customer's channels evaluation. This research advances our theoretical understanding of online channel adoption behaviors and offers practical implications for organizations to manage such online channel adoption. © 2012 Elsevier B.V.