Influence of Personality Traits on Choice of Retail Purchasing Channel: Literature Review and Research Agenda

Consumers can choose to buy products through various retail channels (e.g., online or in-store), resulting in a need for retailers to provide a well-integrated shopping experience. However, individual factors, such as a customer’s personality, can influence how a channel is perceived and, as such, can alter their subsequent behavior. Thus, it is critical for retailers to better understand personality-related influences and how these can affect a customer’s purchase channel decision. Against this background, the purpose of this structured review is to analyze the extant literature on the influences of personality traits on purchasing channel decisions. After extensive initial screening, twenty-four papers published in 2003–2021 were included in the analysis and synthesis phase of this literature review. The results show how personality traits (including Big Five factors and more fine-grained factors like playfulness) influence the choice of retail purchasing channels. Among other results, we find that online shopping intentions have been studied most as outcome variable and that, in contrast to people high in openness to experience, people high in agreeableness are less likely to shop online. While we synthesize findings in the domains of mobile commerce, social commerce, mall shopping, and augmented and virtual reality as well, little research has compared the effects of personality traits on multiple channels. Based on our findings, we discuss managerial implications as well as directions for future research which are described in the form of a research agenda.