The Effect of Crowding on Visit Ratio at an Product Area: Based on RFID Data in a Japanese Supermarket

Crowding is often described as an important environmental factor in consumers' evaluations of service experiences. Prior research identifies that crowding is significantly influence with customers' in-store purchases such as the customer satisfaction, purchase intention, and purchase number. However, the retailing literature are still lacks directly empirical studies about how the crowding influence customer in-store behaviors which effect these in-store purchases, such as the customer crowding adaptation strategies. In this study, we focus on a shop area's visit ratio to describe the customers' crowding adaptation strategies, and try to investigate how crowding effect on the customers' adaptation strategies in an area level by analyzing the RFID-based Path data and matched POS data which collected from a Japanese supermarket. According to the regress analysis, the result shown the linear correlativity between these variables is prominent, which means increasing a shop area's crowding situation can actually help retailers to attract more customers to visit that area. The finding can further provide guidelines for retailers' crowd management or design of public spaces in store.