Investigating Consumer Behavior in an Online Grocery Context: the Impact of the Adopted Stock-out Policy and Virtual Shelf Placement

The first objective of this book is to map the differences between an electronic and a traditional shopping environment and to indicate how these typical online environment characteristics affect online purchase behavior. The focus is on regular choice environments but especially on environments disrupted by stock-outs. In this respect, an overview of the most striking differences between the two shopping environments is developed and a state-of-the-art of out-of-stock knowledge is generated. The second objective is to investigate how online purchase behavior decisions are affected by an e-tailerâ¿¿s merchandising actions. We focus on the following two actions: (1) Implementation of active stock-out management to explicitly deal with the negative effects of stock-outs (the online stock-out policy) and (2) Implementation of in-store, shelf-related management (the virtual shelf placement). The analyses should help shed some light on the challenges in the online environment and should be especially useful to professionals in website design and marketing fields, or anyone else who may be considering how to better use their e-commerce site.