Analysing influence of retail accessibility and spatial organisation of in store retail on cross channel shopping behaviour in tier II Indian cities

Abstract

Abstract The rapid digitalisation of retail has fundamentally altered how consumers navigate physical and digital channels within a single purchase episode, yet the geographic conditions that structure these choices remain poorly understood. Physical accessibility to retail space, a foundational concern of applied geography, has been largely absent from cross-channel shopping research, which has overwhelmingly favoured psychological over spatial explanations. This gap is particularly acute in Tier-II Indian cities, where concentrated retail morphology, steep accessibility gradients, and rapidly expanding digital infrastructure create conditions under which distance effects on consumer channel choice should be most consequential, yet these contexts remain absent from the literature. This study addresses that gap through GIS-based road-network distance measurement and survey data from urban consumers in a planned Tier-II Indian city. Geotagged residential locations were mapped against major retail agglomerations, and a spatial threshold was derived through structural break analysis. Regression models with heteroskedasticity-consistent standard errors and bootstrapped mediation analysis were applied to test how spatial friction shapes webrooming and showrooming behaviour and whether perceived accessibility mediates these relationships. Road-network distance emerges as the dominant predictor of cross-channel shopping behaviour, with directionally opposite and asymmetric effects on the two behaviours. Perceived accessibility mediates the distance-webrooming relationship but not the distance-showrooming relationship, revealing that spatial friction operates through different cognitive pathways for deliberate versus situational consumer behaviours. These results carry implications for retail location strategy, urban accessibility planning, and spatial equity policy in India’s rapidly urbanising secondary cities, and offer a replicable analytical framework for comparable Global South contexts.