Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 40 (2020) 100930

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Electronic Commerce Research and Applications

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/elerap

A 2020 perspective on “Spreading the word: How customer experience in a T

traditional retail setting influences consumer traditional and electronic
word-of-mouth intention”
⁎
Jose Ribamar Siqueira Jr.a, , Nathalie García Peñab, Enrique ter Horstc, German Molinad
a
Pontificia Universidad Javeriana, Bogotá, Colombia
b
CESA, Bogotá, Colombia
c
Universidad de Los Andes, Bogotá, Colombia
d
Idalion Capital Group, London, United Kingdom

A R T I C LE I N FO A B S T R A C T

Keywords: The convergence of the brick and mortar and online worlds is now more prominent than ever. It is becoming
Bayesian modeling increasingly difficult to operate exclusively in one of these two environments. While physical stores provide
Evidence-based empirical research retailers with a unique opportunity to deliver unique in-store experiences that can also leverage their online
Customer experience features, online retailers are also establishing a presence in the physical world to supplement the experience
Omnichannel business model
offered online. Therefore, understanding how consumers behave in each of these environments and how these
Retailing
Social media
behaviors are expressed across both worlds has become increasingly important to marketers managing omni-
P-value paradigm channel operations. Only by providing a complete experience to the consumer from all possible contact points
will retailers be able to achieve their omnichannel goals.

The rumors of traditional retail’s death have been greatly ex-
aggerated. Death would come in the form of online retailers out-
performing the “digital beast,” Amazon.com. There have not been many
examples in the United States that would seem to validate that claim
though: Circuit City, CompUSA, and Sears, among others, all became
part of the history of retailing, not its digital future. The timeline that
depicts the troubles of the retail industry also serves to highlight the
transformation it underwent. This transformation finally made head-
lines in 2019 when major U.S. retailers, Target and Best Buy, posted
their best results in recent years. Target’s stock went from about US$69
per share at the beginning of 2019 to US$127.45 on December 31,
2019, and Best Buy’s share price rose from US$56.51 to US$87.82 in the
same period. The success experienced by these companies is a result of
two major initiatives that have become their central pillars: an active
customer experience program and the integration of digital merchan-
dising with physical stores in a true omnichannel fashion. This allowed
the two companies to deliver a seamless customer experience between
the two environments where they operate.
Retailers can no longer see themselves as brick and mortar vendors
only. They have to become cognizant that physical stores provide them
with a unique opportunity that most of their online competitors cannot
leverage: providing customers with unique in-store customer experi-
ences. Nevertheless, this strategy works both ways as exemplified by
Amazon’s acquisition of food retailer, Wholefoods in the U.S. and its
increasing presence in the physical retail space with kiosks in shopping
malls and its Amazon Go stores. The idea is relatively simple and re-
volves around the theme of integration of the two retail spaces (online
with a brick-and-mortar presence) while supporting strong customer
experience.
Customer experience will continue to be a hot topic in the future
since consumers have developed an authoritative voice on social media
that can be used to demand better experiences from the companies with
which they do business. Both environments can leverage their unique
experiences to learn more about their customers and continue to im-
prove the development of meaningful omnichannel customer experi-
ences. Nonetheless, the critical component of this entire process is the
customer that now inhabits two worlds. In the same way that our earlier
study (Siqueira et al., 2019) examined how an experience in a brick-
and-mortar retailer impacted online customer behavior in the form of
social media word of mouth, it would be interesting to see research in
future taking a reverse approach, by examining the behavior of online
shoppers in the physical world in terms of word-of-mouth intention and

⁎
Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: siqueiraj@javeriana.edu.co (J.R. Siqueira), nathalie.pena@cesa.edu.co (N. García Peña), ea.terhorst@uniandes.edu.co (E. ter Horst),
german@germanmolina.com (G. Molina).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.elerap.2020.100930
Received 14 January 2020; Accepted 14 January 2020
Available online 28 January 2020
1567-4223/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
J.R. Siqueira, et al.
interactions with peers while in-store.
Furthermore, it is of interest to scholars to study the impact of new
technologies used in both environments. It is increasingly common to
find artificial intelligence (AI) in e-commerce environments that seek to
humanize the consumer experience, as well as the use of applications or
the Internet of Things (IoT) to streamline and digitize the experience in
brick-on-mortar stores. This combination of technologies in the physical
and virtual world means that the boundaries between them are in-
creasingly blurred. So, retailers should understand that they should not
be separated, but rather integrated to reach their omnichannel goal: to
provide a complete experience to the consumer from all possible con-
tact points.
From the methodological perspective, evidence-based research in
the e-commerce area will continue to benefit from advances in the
quantitative literature. Two increasingly overlapping areas of quanti-
tative research have emerged in recent years in unison with advances in
computational power and algorithmic methods, namely approaches
built on the Bayesian paradigm, and machine learning methods
(Kauffman et al., 2017). While the former methods have mostly grown
within the statistics literature, the latter ones have mainly flourished in
the computer science literature. Bayesian methods are well-suited for
small sample problems, both with and without the availability of prior
information (Gelman et al., 2004). Whether the design is experimental
or observational, or whether the data available are large or limited, all
of which can be found in the e-commerce literature, decision-makers
can benefit from novel evidence-based quantitative methods (Phang et al.,
2019).
Evidence-based statistical tools have increasingly moved from
binary decision-making rules (often reliant on large samples to provide
sufficient statistical power) to provide a more detailed perspective of
the existing evidence around the topics of interest, regardless of sample
size. Also, p-values arbitrarily close to (yet lower than) 0.05 have been
used to justify statistical significance, while those arbitrarily close yet
larger have been deemed non-significant, though both provide close to
equivalent evidence against the underlying hypotheses tested. The
Bayesian paradigm, which was used in our manuscript, has allowed
moving beyond p-values into the post p < 0.05 era, as defined in
Wasserstein (2016), and towards a better understanding of the
Electronic Commerce Research and Applications 40 (2020) 100930
information available from, and uncertainty associated with the data.
Moving beyond the black-or-white statistical rules has, in turn,
provided a grayscale description of the existing evidence, also reducing
some of the ethical risks around p-hacking (Wasserstein, 2016;
Wasserstein et al., 2019). While information can still be summarized
with similar metrics (with univariate posterior intervals oftentimes re-
placing traditional confidence intervals) and decisions can be made
under similar rules, the statistical outcomes available from these new
methods significantly surpass those from traditional summaries. A nice
illustration of the shortcomings of the p-value paradigm and the solu-
tions presented under the Bayesian paradigm are shown in Berger
(2003), as well as the accompanying applet and description (Berger and
Molina, 2001).
The future of evidence-based e-commerce research will continue to
be aligned with advances in the quantitative methods literature. In a
world of accelerated technological progress, in the midst of the so-
called Fourth Industrial Revolution (Schwab, 2017), new challenges
and opportunities will continue to rise, especially in the world of digital
business.
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