The mediating role of perceived fairness in consumers’ response to post-purchase ‘out of stock’ in an online grocery context

This study investigates consumer response to a retailer’s substitution policy when facing post-purchase ‘out of stock’ (OOS) in an online grocery shopping context. Substitution policies (timeliness of OOS notification; and substituted product) can have detrimental effects on consumers’ satisfaction with the retailer and behaviour response (whether to accept or reject the substitution). As post-purchased OOS indicates a failure of service, the study focuses its investigation on the mediating effects of perceived fairness (PF) of retailers’ substitution policies on consumers’ response. It is predicted that procedural fairness will have a stronger effect on mitigating consumers’ negative OOS experience than distributive (outcome) fairness. The research will be conducted using three online scenario based experiments.

http://conference.bam.ac.uk/BAM2016/htdocs/confere...