Shifting Brick-and-Mortar Retailing to the Next Level: Exploring the Quality of Digital Services: An Abstract

Although the offer of digital services via mobile or fixed devices to visitors of inner-city shopping areas can be considered at an early stage, the usage of innovative technologies is gaining ground in retail practice. Surprisingly, within marketing science, little is known about customers’ perception of the quality of digital services offered by traditional retailing. This article reviews prior conceptualizations of the role of technologies in retail and service marketing, management and information systems. The quality of digital services is introduced as the extent to which a consumer believes that the digital service offered by a retail destination performs well. A digital service is conceptualized as e.g. an availability check of products offered via a shopping center’s website or app. In the framework of a mixed-methods approach, a measurement tool is developed by means of four qualitative studies compromising a face-to-face survey with shoppers, an online panel and expert judges. Empirical findings demonstrate that the application of two scale parts reflecting a second-order construct is reasonable. The scale is validated by means of three quantitative studies, a student survey, a consumer panel and an online experiment. The position of the developed construct within the nomological network of related marketing constructs is empirically supported. Further, using an online experiment, we find that the quality of digital services can explain variance in consumer outcome behaviors and perceptions. The conceptualization and validation of the measure shifts the retail agglomeration literature from a traditional offline view to an up-to-date digital perspective. Recent studies in marketing science present initial approaches of capturing consumer-perceived applications of digital technologies within retail agglomerations, but due to sole explorative research approaches and lacking coherent definitions of the investigated construct, the development of a reliable and easy-to-administer scale had yet to emerge. Applying the scale in marketing practice enables retail destinations to assess the performance of offered digital services, evoking in turn an overall attractive evaluation of the retail destination.