Do self-checkouts affect supermarket loyalty?

Although self-checkout has many advantages and disadvantages for both consumers and retailers, little formal research has been conducted on the impact of self-checkout on the consumer shopping experience. This led researchers at Drexel University's LeBow School of Business to study how grocery store automated checkout systems affected customer loyalty compared to traditional checkout systems.

Yanliu Huang, Ph.D., an associate professor at LeBow, and Farhana Nusrat, Ph.D., a former student at Drexel and now an assistant professor at the University of San Diego, conducted five studies showing how likely customers are to stay loyal. Supermarkets if you use regular checkout service. They found that loyalty is reflected in the likelihood of returning to a store in the future.

These findings and the full study were recently published in the Journal of Business Research. Huang and Nusrat found that ease of payment and a sense of entitlement play an important role in explaining the loyalty effect. We also found that the number of items purchased during a purchase also influences how payment type affects customer loyalty.

Our findings show that despite the advantages of automated checkout systems in terms of speed, ease of use, and cost savings, they are less likely to lead to customer loyalty compared to traditional checkout systems, especially when the number of items purchased is relatively large (eg, more than 15 items) may decrease. ). ), Juan said.

In particular, they noted that the effort saved during the payment process and the customer's sense of rights explain the impact of payment type on customer loyalty. The extra effort required to process and package purchases and waiting for stores to provide service hurt self-checkout and reduced store loyalty.

However, when shoppers saw the extra effort to checkout as a rewarding experience, their in-store loyalty was similar to that of regular shoppers. Huang and Nusrat's study is a compilation of five studies on data collection through crowdsourcing platforms. In the first study, they surveyed people about their most recent trip to the grocery store and reported that they had shopped in the past seven days.

This was followed by questions about the payment method used and questions about customer loyalty. The study found that subscription customers reported higher in-store loyalty than self-pay customers.

In the second, third, and fourth studies, Huang and Nusrat used hypothetical scenarios in which participants imagined going to a supermarket and doing some shopping. At the routine checkout, participants were told that the cashier would help them scan the boxes at the checkout counter.

In the self-checkout condition, participants were instructed to scan all items directly at the checkout and then place them in a bag. Participants were then shown a screen showing the prices of some items and how much they had saved.

All five studies measured loyalty to supermarkets, while the third measured effort saved during the checkout process and customer rights. The third finding showed that the effort saved and customers' sense of entitlement during the checkout process explain the impact of the payment system on customer loyalty to the store.

A fourth study found that the impact of payment type on customer loyalty is more likely to occur with larger baskets when the number of items purchased during a shopping trip exceeds 15. In the fifth study (field study), Huan and Nusrat proposed an intervention by encouraging participants to associate extra effort with rewards associated with self-reflection.

Specifically, participants in the first phase who said they would go to the supermarket to buy food in the next five days entered the study and were randomly assigned to read either a neutral passage about trees or a passage about self-control.

Tasks that require effort can make you feel accomplished and rewarded. This intervention aimed to influence participants' perceptions of self-assessment by allowing them to perceive the extra effort associated with self-assessment as satisfying and satisfying. Participants were asked to visit a grocery store over five days, upload receipts from those store visits, indicate the payment method they used, and answer questions about store loyalty.

"We found that when we encouraged customers to see the extra effort associated with self-checkout as a rewarding experience, their in-store loyalty was similar to that of regular checkout customers," Huang said.

Haung and Nusrat noted that the study could help inform retailers about installing or removing self-checkout systems and how to better manage the systems to ensure a positive customer experience. For example, to overcome the negative impact of customer loyalty, the seller must try to effectively create an autonomous government experience (for example, compensation experience).

"Juang said," It offers a retail shop to increase loyalty to customers by increasing general commercial experience as an AutoLP player. ”

Researchers have similar sleeves in similar studies, including their own propulsion technologies, scans, scans, and autofraud, as well as the improvement, of luxury houses and stores.