This study focuses on a broadly-adopted but greatly-underexplored technology in offline retail – online-merge-offline (OMO) technology (e.g., “Scan-and-Go”). Although novel technologies have been documented to always improve customer experience, how OMO reshapes customers’ shopping behaviors and whether it can reinforce retailers’ economic revenues are ambiguous. Based on a unique fine-grained dataset from an offline-oriented retailer who initiated an OMO technology, we empirically reveal that the initiation of OMO renders customers to purchase more orders but perform less impulsive consumption. These shopping behaviors are accompanied with insignificant incremental revenues caused by the OMO for retailers. We propose and validate several nontrivial mechanisms that contribute to the findings.
