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| SUBSTITUTION OR COMPLEMENTARITY: ONLINE SHOPPING AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH TRADITIONAL SHOPPING BEHAVIOR |
| WANG Ming-feng, LU Shan |
| Centre for Modern Chinese City Studies, East China Normal University, Shanghai 200062, China |
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Abstract With the rapid popularization of Internet technology, the online retailing market has been maintaining a rapid growth in the past few years in China. There is a prevailing allegation recently that E-commerce would replace the traditional retailing market, but it's shored by little evidence. The relationship between online shopping and traditional shopping is currently one of the most popular topics in E-commerce researches. However, it is not yet clear that how online shopping will influence traditional shopping behavior. The studies' results turned out to be contradictory. Many studies considered online shopping as a substitution, while others go for enhancement and/or complement. Some even thought that physical shopping is more likely to be impervious. Based on a shopping behavior survey of college students, this paper dissects how online shopping impacts on the travel of traditional shopping. Results indicate that generally, online shopping is unlikely to infect consumers' shopping travels.On one hand, the impact of Internet surfing and online shopping on the traditional daily shopping travels mainly bring about a reduction in the frequency and distance of daily travels but an increase in the frequency of multi-purpose outgoings. By comparison, the results show that some consumers will decrease the shopping travel distance after online search and shopping activities. But this kind of the consumers is still mostly favor traditional shopping style, so the overall shopping behavior doesn't change greatly. On the other hand, online shopping behavior may increase the frequency of consumer's non-routine shopping travels and the distance of a single trip. Online shoppers tend to purchase most commodities on Internet, and probably travel a longer distance to make a purchase because they search the information for certain special products online. In short, the relationship between online shopping and traditional shopping is complex, neither a substitution nor a complement.
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Received: 03 September 2011
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2012, Vol. 27 
