The Use of Mobile Apps to Facilitate Customers’ Choice-Making When Grocery Shopping

This paper aims to expand the knowledge of how mobile apps can be used to establish a smart grocery retail setting. By offering real-time, personalized digital information, mobile apps enable bidirectional interaction with customers in the grocery shopping situation. A conjoint experiment (n = 90) was used to examine the use of mobile apps in a consumer choice situation where participants were choosing fresh salmon in a grocery store. Findings show that, relative to static information given by the mobile app about expiry date, price, offers, and quality indicator, digital information was the most prominent attribute. Among digital information given by the mobile app, quality indicators by other customers were the most prominent, followed by an offer based on a product in the shopping basket, updated expiry date, and real-time price. The results expand our understanding of how mobile apps can be used to design a setting in the grocery store that creates value for customers. Based on this result, we recommend that managers that plan to invest in mobile app technology to improve the electronic commerce ecosystem should include digital information.