What affects shopper’s choices of carrying devices in grocery retailing and what difference does it make? A literature review and conceptual model

ABSTRACT

Shopping carts, dating back at least to 1936, are not only used as an aid for shoppers to increase sales but are now being further developed and tested in relation to healthy food selection. To improve retailers’ ability to discover, generate, and capture the value related to both current practice and future innovations; such as consumers using smart carts when shopping, we systematically go through the empirical literature on carrying equipment in in-store shopping. We expose how limited the literature is by revealing the scarce number of studies on the effectiveness of baskets and carts on consumer behavior and especially when classified into different research themes. The contribution is a systematic literature review and a conceptual framework covering the most important factors affecting the choice of in-store carrying equipment, as well as the consequences of these choices in terms of in-store behaviors and transactional outcomes.

KEYWORDS:

• Shopping carts
• shopping baskets
• shopping device
• smart carts
• carrying equipment

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their invaluable help with this article. We also thank Joseph Karlton Gallogly, Herborg Sörensen and Atli Geir Hallgrímsson, researchers at the Reykjavik University Centre for Research in Marketing and Consumer Psychology, for their assistance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the The Icelandic Centre for Research [RANNIS, grant no. 216011 to Valdimar Sigurdsson].

Notes on contributors

Nils Magne Larsen

Nils Magne Larsen is an Associate Professor at UiT The Arctic University of Norway. He holds a PhD from Brunel University, London, an MBA from University of Wisconsin-Madison, and a Lic.rer.pol. degree from Universität Mannheim, Germany. He is the author of several books and chapters in books and has published in journals such as Journal of Business Research, Journal of Promotion Management, Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, Perspectives on Behavior Science (Behavior Analyst), Service Industries Journal, and Psychological Record.

Valdimar Sigurdsson

Prof. Valdimar Sigurdsson is the Head of Marketing at the School of Business of Reykjavik University and the director for the Centre for Marketing and Consumer Psychology. He did his Ph.D. at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom. Valdimar’s research interest include consumer behaviour analysis (consumer psychology), in-store marketing (retailing), digital marketing, and tourism. Valdimar has a profile on Google Scholar and on Research Gate. His publications have appeared in Journal of Business Research, Computers in Human Behavior, Marketing Theory and the Psychological Record.