Retail "Save the Sale" tactics: Consumer perceptions of in‐store logistics service recovery
研究消费者在店内遇到缺货时，如何评估零售商提供的不同物流服务补救方案（如从其他店铺或配送中心发货、送货到家或到店自取），并基于公平理论通过四个实验解释其感知和购买决策。
Abstract To prevent customers from leaving stores empty‐handed when encountering a stockout, retailers increasingly leverage their inventory visibility and order fulfillment capabilities to implement “save the sale” tactics. Retailers have several logistics service options available in designing “save the sale” stockout recovery initiatives: “buy at store—ship from (different) store” and the “buy at store—ship from DC,” leading to different order fulfillment speeds. In addition, there is the home delivery approach, which is generally more convenient to customers than the option of store delivery for customer pick‐up. In this paper, we explore how customers evaluate and respond to varying elements of these “save the sale” stockout recovery services when experiencing an in‐store stockout. Building on justice theory and literatures on service recovery and impression formation, we develop a series of four experiments. We explain and provide empirical evidence for (1) why and how customers assess specific stockout service recovery dimensions (i.e., order fulfillment speed and delivery location) as more just, (2) how customers appraise the justice of these bundled stockout recovery dimensions, (3) how purchase involvement and monetary offers impact these perceptions, and (4) how justice perceptions and stockout recoveries impact the likelihood of “saving the sale.”