The Effects of Off-Price Store Opening on the Incumbent Channels of a Multichannel Retailer: Full-Line Stores Versus Online Store

Abstract

Many high-end retailers operate off-price or discount versions of their full-line stores to engage value-conscious customers. In this study, the authors empirically examine the effects of a high-end retailer's opening of off-price stores on customer behavior. Leveraging a unique customer-level dataset spanning pre- and postopening periods of off-price stores in the United States by a multichannel retailer, the authors disentangle the effects of physical off-price store opening on the incumbent channels (full-line physical stores and online store) and document the underlying mechanisms. The authors employ the group-time treatment effects doubly robust estimator that exploits the staggered opening of multiple off-price stores. The authors find that off-price store opening decreases customer spending (substitution effect or value customer effect) at the full-line store and increases spending at the online store (complementarity effect or option-to-return-products effect). The authors report that the retailer's new customers (i.e., those acquired via the retailer's off-price stores) tend to spend less, return products at a higher rate, purchase lower-priced items, and are in the lower-income group. Furthermore, the regular customers who shop at the full-line stores of the upscale retailer spend less at and return their online purchases at a higher rate to the off-price stores than the value-conscious customers. The authors perform a battery of robustness checks to rule out effects of confounding factors. Based on the results, the authors offer new insights and implications for high-end multichannel retailers that adopt an off-price store opening strategy.