The Role of Webrooming and Showrooming in the Digital Economy: Challenges and Opportunities

Description

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.23946636

Kiran Bala¹ and Renu Rai² (Department of Commerce, Mata Sundri University Girls College, Mansa Punjab, India¹ and Department of Commerce, Punjabi University Patiala, Punjab, India²)

The rapid development of the digital economy has transformed consumer shopping behaviors, leading to new ways of shopping like webrooming and showrooming that blend online and offline shopping. This paper looks at the challenges and opportunities that these new shopping habits bring in today’s changing retail world. Based on the research, it shows how factors like trust, worries about risk, convenience, personalization experiences, and reactions to inappropriate marketing affect customers as they switch between shopping channels. Webrooming has benefited such as better decision-making, easier shopping, and enhanced customer satisfaction, while showrooming helps with brand recognition, physical product interaction, and quick product access. But both these behaviours also bring problems, like price differences in affordable prices, ideas about not being operational, declining retail trade, mismanagement of goods, and privacy issues. The study concludes that while webrooming and showrooming are changing traditional retail models, they also offer huge opportunities for new innovation. Retailers, who adopt integrated omnichannel strategies, maintain transparency, and utilize personalized services, can turn these shopping habits into long term advantages in the digital world. This study is based on secondary data and adopts a descriptive qualitative research approach. Data were collected from published peer-reviewed journal articles, books, conference papers, industry reports, and online sources related to webrooming, showrooming, omnichannel retailing, and the digital economy. The collected literature was systematically reviewed and analysed using a thematic approach to identify key challenges, opportunities, and emerging trends associated with cross-channel consumer behaviour.