IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ant/wpaper/2005005.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Opportunities for active stock-out management in online stores: The impact of the stock-out policy on online stock-out reactions

Author

Listed:
  • BREUGELMANS, Els
  • CAMPO, Katia
  • GIJSBRECHTS, Els

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of an online retailer’s stock-out policy on purchase incidence and choice. We make a distinction between three policies: (1) stock-outs are immediately visible and there are no suggestions, (2) stock-outs are only visible after clicking and (3) a replacement item is suggested for each stock-out product. Results from an extensive and realistic online grocery shopping experiment reveal that the adopted stock-out policy has a significant impact on both decisions. First, making stock-outs not immediately visible creates confusion and intensifies the consumer’s loss experience, thereby reducing the tendency to buy in the category. Second, while suggesting a replacement item normally leads to a substantial increase in the item’s choice probability, this effect is canceled out when higher-priced – suspicious – items are suggested. Overall, these results indicate that retailers have an interest in pursuing open and convenience-oriented stock-out policies.

Suggested Citation

  • BREUGELMANS, Els & CAMPO, Katia & GIJSBRECHTS, Els, 2005. "Opportunities for active stock-out management in online stores: The impact of the stock-out policy on online stock-out reactions," Working Papers 2005005, University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ant:wpaper:2005005
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://repository.uantwerpen.be/docman/irua/96e790/85cee9cf.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Penn, Jerrod & Matopoulos, Aristides & House, Lisa, 2010. "Response to Out of Stock Produce and its Underlying Economic Considerations," 2010 Annual Meeting, February 6-9, 2010, Orlando, Florida 56487, Southern Agricultural Economics Association.
    2. Nicole Wiebach & Jana L. Diels, 2011. "The impact of context and promotion on consumer responses and preferences in out-of-stock situations," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2011-050, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany.
    3. Sanchez-Ruiz Lidia & Blanco Beatriz & Kyguolienė Asta, 2018. "A Theoretical Overview of the Stockout Problem in Retail: from Causes to Consequences," Management of Organizations: Systematic Research, Sciendo, vol. 79(1), pages 103-116, June.
    4. Manuel Cardós & Ester Guijarro & Eugenia Babiloni, 2017. "On the estimation of on-hand stocks for base-stock policies and lost sales systems and its impact on service measures," International Journal of Production Research, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 55(16), pages 4680-4694, August.
    5. K. Skouri, 2018. "An EOQ model with backlog-dependent demand," Operational Research, Springer, vol. 18(2), pages 561-574, July.
    6. Wiebach, Nicole & Hildebrandt, Lutz, 2012. "Explaining customers' switching patterns to brand delisting," Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, Elsevier, vol. 19(1), pages 1-10.
    7. Visser, T.R. & Agatz, N.A.H. & Spliet, R., 2019. "Simultaneous customer interaction in online booking systems for attended home delivery," ERIM Report Series Research in Management ERS-2019-011-LIS, Erasmus Research Institute of Management (ERIM), ERIM is the joint research institute of the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University and the Erasmus School of Economics (ESE) at Erasmus University Rotterdam.
    8. Grewal, Dhruv & Kopalle, Praveen & Marmorstein, Howard & Roggeveen, Anne L., 2012. "Does Travel Time to Stores Matter? The Role of Merchandise Availability," Journal of Retailing, Elsevier, vol. 88(3), pages 437-444.
    9. Xuanming Su & Fuqiang Zhang, 2009. "On the Value of Commitment and Availability Guarantees When Selling to Strategic Consumers," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(5), pages 713-726, May.
    10. Eugenia Babiloni & Ester Guijarro, 2020. "Fill rate: from its definition to its calculation for the continuous (s, Q) inventory system with discrete demands and lost sales," Central European Journal of Operations Research, Springer;Slovak Society for Operations Research;Hungarian Operational Research Society;Czech Society for Operations Research;Österr. Gesellschaft für Operations Research (ÖGOR);Slovenian Society Informatika - Section for Operational Research;Croatian Operational Research Society, vol. 28(1), pages 35-43, March.
    11. Berger, A. & Grigoriev, A. & van Loon, J., 2008. "Price strategy implementation," Research Memorandum 035, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    12. Hickman, William & Mortimer, Julie Holland, 2016. "Demand Estimation with Availability Variation," SocArXiv qe69j, Center for Open Science.
    13. Martin Adam & Michael Wessel & Alexander Benlian, 2019. "Of early birds and phantoms: how sold-out discounts impact entrepreneurial success in reward-based crowdfunding," Review of Managerial Science, Springer, vol. 13(3), pages 545-560, June.
    14. Becerril-Arreola, Rafael & Leng, Mingming & Parlar, Mahmut, 2013. "Online retailers’ promotional pricing, free-shipping threshold, and inventory decisions: A simulation-based analysis," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 230(2), pages 272-283.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ant:wpaper:2005005. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Joeri Nys (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ftufsbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.