From Complementarity to Cannibalization: Disentangling the Time-Varying Impact of XR Adoption on Multichannel Retail: Completed Research Paper

The development of extended reality poses great challenges for multichannel retailers. Multichannel retailers are encouraged to adopt extended reality online for providing interactive and entertaining shopping experiences. However, it may replace the necessity of offline channels and result in high operational wastes for retailers with both online and offline channels. To ascertain the impact of extended reality adoption, this study combined data on retailer’s online technology use and offline store performance records, which covers over 1100 retail brands and encompasses 13497 observations from 2018 to 2022. By using a fixed-effect model, this paper founds that the extended reality adoption duration has a non-linear impact on offline store conversion rate. Besides, the affordance of create-ability can significantly moderate the above relationship. And offline store purpose saliently influences the relationship between extended reality adoption duration and offline conversion rate. Findings from this study yield actionable suggestions for multichannel retailers adopting extended reality.