Mobile location-based services (LBS) represent a promising opportunity for inner-city retailers and service providers to react to changes in customer behavior due to digitalization. To gain competitive advantages, mobile LBS must offer customers high value-in-use and help them reach their shopping goals during their inner-city visits. Shopping goals differ depending on shopping patterns; thus, these patterns may influence customers’ evaluation of mobile LBS during inner-city visits. Since value-in-use is not only a context-specific but also a temporally dynamic construct, customers’ user experience must also be considered. Therefore, this study investigates the influence of customers’ shopping patterns and current user experience on their evaluation of mobile LBS’ value-in-use during inner-city visits. Moreover, the impacts of the offers transmitted through mobile LBS on the value-in-use are examined.
Using field test data, we empirically verify a conceptualization of mobile LBS and determine a comprehensive view of mobile LBS’ value-in-use during shopping trips with different shopping patterns and user experience within a mixed-method analysis. Our results identify both utilitarian and hedonic value-in-use components as being empirically relevant for high value-in-use evaluations regarding mobile LBS in inner cities. Furthermore, the relevance of monetary benefits, fun benefits, and irritation on value-in-use vary according to customers’ user experience. A customer’s shopping pattern affects the value-in-use of mobile LBS; however, this effect is not as differentiated as expected. Moreover, the number of relevant monetary and non-monetary offers transmitted during an inner-city visit are shown to represent a potential, albeit limited, management instrument for affecting mobile LBS’ value-in-use.
The aim of this study is to identify and empirically validate relevant benefits and costs of perceived value in use of an inner city shopping trip. Moreover, we examine the relevance of customers’ value perceptions for four behavioral outcomes. We identified relevant benefit and cost components as well as behavioral outcomes through a literature review and a qualitative pre-study (n=29) and developed a higher-order conceptualization of the perceived value in use. We tested our research model by conducting a variance-based structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach (n=314). Our findings suggest both retail-related and inner city-related benefits are important value components, which indicate that inner city retailers and city management must cooperate to increase customers’ value perceptions. Furthermore, our results demonstrate the importance of a high value in use of inner city shopping trips to generate competitive advantages over online retailers and peripheral shopping malls.
