Publisher's Synopsis
Online purchases are increasingly becoming a significant portion of total purchases in most product categories.
We use a three-stage model to study (i) the choice of the first website visited, (ii) the duration of browsing on travel websites before making a purchase (iii) the choice of the website where consumers will make the purchase, and how a later stage choice is affected by decisions in previous stages.
A significant impact of the choice of the first site visited and browsing duration on the choice of the purchase site indicates the importance of modeling these decisions simultaneously.
While prior research in marketing has looked at browsing or individual category purchase decisions, we study consumers' online purchase of airline, car rental, and hotel purchases together using a unique dataset of household-level dynamic clickstream panel data. We use a two-stage model to study (i) the propensity of consumers to purchase a combination of products as a basket and (ii) the choice of the website where consumers will make those purchases.
We then estimate the propensity of consumers to purchase a particular combination of products in their basket from different websites.
Our results can help managers identify the major determinants of multi- category purchase as well as provide insights into cross promoting as well as upselling other products to consumers who visit their website.
