دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی خرده فروشان مراقب باشید: غیر قابل دسترس بودن بازپرداخت محصول و رفتار مصرف کننده - الزویر 2018

ABSTRACT

The wide variety of retailer return policies can cause consumers confusion. While keeping costs contained, very restrictive Return Policies (RPs) may mar consumer behavior. As a first attempt to examine the impact expectation of return control and involvement have on consumers, this study builds a conceptual model with support of the theory of psychological reactance and lends insights into how and why RPs, specifically the denial of product returns, affect consumers during and after the product return process. Our findings indicate that when consumers have high expectations of successfully returning a product and are denied, RPs create significantly higher negative attitudes toward the retailer and attempts to regain control both directly by asking the retailer for an exception and indirectly by retaliating against the retailer in the form of future fraudulent returning. Return-encounter tensions may be lessened by making consumers aware, before purchase, of the RPs.

5. Concluding remarks

This research extends the product returns literature by emphasizing the importance of understanding consumers' expectations of return control and its impact on consumers' responses to being denied a product return. As argued earlier, product return denials create significantly higher negative outcomes for retailers including increased negative attitudes to the retailers and attempts to regain control both directly (by arguing for an exception to the RP) and indirectly (retaliation against the retailer in the form of future fraudulent returning) when consumers have high expectations as opposed to low expectations of successfully returning a product and are denied.

This research also demonstrates that experience with successfully returning a product to a retailer is sufficient enough to set the expectation of return control for future returns, which suggests that retailers' practice of varying return policies over time and across product categories may lead to unrealistic consumer expectations of return control and future reactance. Counterintuitively, the impact that expectation of control has on consumers' reactance and its negative outcomes is so strong that being denied the return of a high priced product is statistically the same as being denied the return of a low priced product when consumers expect to be able to return these products and are denied. Further research should aim to determine how retailers can most effectively set realistic expectations of return control in order to minimize reactance while also maximizing consumers' likelihood of purchase.