The Impact of ‘Need for Touch’ in Online Retailing for Produce: An Abstract

The current research addresses two marketing areas: sensory marketing and online retailing. While online retailing continues to gain importance, online grocery retailing, especially perishable products such as produce, lags behind other product categories. For example, 62% of consumers buy books and 52% buy toys or games online (Statista 2017), yet only 4% of US grocery shoppers rely on online channels (Hartman Group 2018). This study focuses on a psychological explanation grounded in sensory marketing for consumers’ hesitation to purchase produce online: consumers’ innate need for touch (NFT) and thus the absence of haptic diagnosticity in online retailing. Peck and Childers (2003) define NFT as the ‘preference for extraction and utilization of information obtained through the haptic system’ (p. 431). In two online studies, consumers rate their perception of produce offered in an online shop. Specifically, they assess quality concerns, affective product evaluation, and willingness to pay (WTP) in offline versus online retailing contexts. Results demonstrate that high-NFT consumers express higher quality concerns and lower affective product evaluation of online offered produce. Further, quality concerns mediate the negative impact of NFT on affective product evaluation. In study 1 (n = 199), this negative influence of NFT is even stronger if consumers use an indirect touch interface (e.g. touchpad or mouse) versus a direct touch interface (e.g. tablet or smartphone). Consequently, input interface type moderates the effect of NFT on affective product evaluation. Study 2 (n = 181) investigates the impacts of NFT on WTP differences between offline and online offered produce at the consumer level. The higher the NFT, the higher the WTP difference. Both quality concerns and affective product evaluation mediate the relationship between NFT and WTP difference between offline and online offered produce. These results have economic implications for online retailers who offer produce for the same price as offline retailers. Overall, e-retailers need to reduce customers’ uncertainty towards online grocery purchasing. For example, technical devices can facilitate the replacement of missing haptic input by offering zooms, 3D-functions, or augmented realities to better imagine haptic properties (Choi and Taylor 2014; Huang and Liao 2017). To conclude, this study closes the gap in research and contributes to the expanding literature on online grocery retailing – specifically produce – by identifying NFT as a diagnostic variable in explaining consumers’ online grocery buying behavior.