Adoption of shopper-facing technologies under social distancing: A conceptualisation and an interplay between task-technology fit and technology trust

Highlights

• This study explores the structure of shopper-facing technologies.

• Three dimensions are labelled as (pre-)shopping technologies, post-shopping technologies and technology-dominant automations.

• We further examine the impacts of task-technology fit and trust on shoppers' adoption of the multi-dimensional technologies.

• Technology trust moderates the impacts of task-technology fit.

• The moderated effects show differentiated explanatory powers toward shoppers' adoption of the multi-dimensional technologies.

Abstract

As an important measure to combat COVID-19 pandemic, social distancing is observed worldwide and increasingly being regarded as a normative behaviour that guides consumers' daily activities. In response, consumers have embraced a variety of digital technologies that facilitate in-home or contactless shopping. This study examines the emerging presence of technologies in shopping activities under social distancing by: 1) conceptualising the structures of shopper-facing technologies, and 2) examining the interplay between task-technology fit and technology-trust that influences shoppers' adoption of the multi-dimensional technologies. Exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modelling are used for data analysis (n = 508). Our findings reveal three distinctive dimensions of shopper-facing technologies which are labelled as shopper-dominant (pre-)shopping technologies, shopper-dominant post-shopping technologies, and technology-dominant automations. Shoppers' adoption intention depends on their evaluations of the technology fit in performing shopping tasks characterised by contact avoidance/minimisation. The impacts of task-technology fit are further moderated by shoppers' trust in those technologies. More importantly, task-technology fit and technology trust are found to demonstrate differentiated explanatory powers towards shoppers’ adoption of the different categories of technologies.

Introduction

Following the several waves of health crisis due to COVID-19 virus, the impacts of the pandemic are expected to be long-lasting. As an important measure to combat the virus, social distancing is observed worldwide and increasingly being practised as a new norm that guides consumers' daily activities. As a result, consumers have been adjusting to an ‘in-home everything’ lifestyle by working, learning and shopping at home (Sheth, 2020). Out of sheer necessity, consumers have embraced a variety of digital technologies that facilitate in-home activities.

In particular, smart shopping and delivery technologies have emerged as the new daily essentials that empower shoppers to search, compare, purchase and receive products anytime and anywhere (Fagerstrøm, Eriksson, & Sigurdsson, 2020; Pantano & Gandini, 2017). Under social distancing, a typical shopping activity would start with searching for recommendations/reviews on social media, followed by placing orders on mobile commerce platforms and requesting for contactless deliveries (e.g. via click-and-collect or self-collect locker). As such, the ubiquitous shopper-facing technologies have brought virtual stores to the consumers’ homes, which remove the time and space restrictions inherent to traditional retailers on the one hand (Inman & Nikolova, 2017; Vannucci & Pantano, 2019), and eliminate all unnecessary social contacts during shopping on the other hand.

To this end, shopping, which is primarily a social activity, seems to have become a technology-dependent task for modern shoppers. As suggested by some scholars, modern shoppers now become socially-excluded but technologically-empowered (Dennis, Bourlakis, Alamanos, Papagiannidis, & Brakus, 2017; Papagiannidis, Bourlakis, Alamanos, & Dennis, 2017). Indeed, the transfer from a ‘high-touch’ to a ‘high-tech’ orientation has been witnessed in the service industry, which is greatly accelerated by the exceptional situation of the COVID-19 pandemic (Almeida, Duarte Santos, & Augusto Monteiro, 2020; Zeng, Chen, & Lew, 2020). For example, in-store shopper-facing kiosks are available for shoppers to check the product information themselves without contacting the sales personnel; Customer service personnel is increasingly being replaced by AI-powered virtual assistants; Automated parcel lockers are being promoted over conventional home deliveries in the field of e-commerce logistics. To an extreme extent, the prolonged practice of social distancing may make the technology-based shopping a common habit and the physical shopping a mere outdoor hobby in future (Sheth, 2020). In this context, our study aims to examine the emerging presence of technologies in shopping activities.

It is worth pointing out that this study focuses on technology-based shopping behaviours under the special context of social distancing. Such behaviours demonstrate some unique characteristics as follows. Firstly, they are primarily utilitarian-driven as the social elements of shopping are more or less eliminated from the technological context. The experiential shopping behaviours are thus not the focus of this study. To this end, we adopt a utilitarian-centric perspective (e.g. task-technology fit) to explain shoppers’ behaviours. Secondly, shoppers initiate the shopping behaviours with a clear short-term functional objective in mind. This is because shoppers are likely to postpone unnecessary shopping in the exceptional situation of social distancing. As a result, they tend to search for relevant information and compare available alternatives that match the anticipated specifications of the products, and subsequently request for post-shopping deliveries. In this regard, this study focuses on the end-to-end shopping process of functional products. Finally, this study does not distinguish between grocery shopping and shopping of general (functional) consumer goods. We argue that shoppers lead a simplified life due to social distancing and they turn to technologies out of necessity. Herein, most shopping activities are motivated similarly, regardless of the types of purchases (e.g. daily groceries or general goods).

Taking an exploratory approach, the first objective of this study is to provide an initial conceptualisation of the diverse shopper-facing technologies based on: a) the technologies' functions in the shopping process, and b) the shoppers' dependency levels on the technologies. With the conceptualisation, we further investigate the degree to which the practice of social distancing drives the adoption of different shopper-facing technologies. This is achieved by applying the theoretical insight of task-technology fit (TTF) (Goodhue & Thompson, 1995). More specifically, TTF theory posits that the successful adoption of a technology depends on the fit between the characteristics of the technology and the task where the technology is involved (Goodhue & Thompson, 1995; Zhou, Lu, & Wang, 2010). Accordingly, the second objective of this study is to assess the fit of different shopper-facing technologies in performing social-distancing shopping, which ultimately drives technology adoption. In addition, technology trust is often identified as a key concern in human-technology interactions (Ameen, Tarhini, Reppel, & Anand, 2021; Ghazizadeh, Lee, & Boyle, 2012; Lippert & Forman, 2006). It is suggested that the trust concern becomes more prominent when a higher level of dependency is required on technologies (Klumpp, 2017). In line with this school of thoughts, our third objective is to examine the interplay between the technology-fit (in this study, task-technology fit and technology-fit are used interchangeably) and technology-trust in shoppers' responses to various technologies. Of particular interest to this study, we aim to discern the differentiated moderating impacts of technology trust on shoppers’ adoption of technologies with varied levels of dependency.

This study contributes to the literature by providing a unified conceptual framework of shopper-facing technologies, which are often examined in the scattered literature of retailing, logistics, and e-commerce studies. Furthermore, our work is among the pioneer studies that look into the phenomenon of technology-dependency among modern shoppers which coincides with the current trend of social distancing. In this regard, our study contributes to the literature with an empirically validated model on shoppers' adoption of shopper-facing technologies given the impacts of social distancing. More importantly, we recognise the differentiated impacts of technology-fit and technology-trust on shoppers' adoption of different technologies. Thus, our contribution also lies in a decomposition of the interplay between technology-fit and technology-trust that explains shoppers’ mixed feeling of reliance on, and resistance to, technologies in the context of social distancing.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. Firstly, a literature review on shopper-facing technologies and theories concerning technology adoption are provided in section 2. Subsequently, two related works of this study are presented. The first work (Section 3) conceptualises and validates the framework of shopper-facing technologies (addressing the first objective), and the second work (Section 4) extends the findings to examine the interplay between technology-fit and technology-trust in shoppers’ adoption of different technologies (addressing the second and third objectives). Finally, we conclude this research with theoretical and practical implications.