Departmental Stores versus Hypermarkets: An Empirical Study of Customer Shopping Experience

Abstract

The purpose of this research paper is focused on exploring and validating the customer satisfaction dimensions and also exploring the impact of these dimensions on shopping experience of departmental stores versus hypermarkets. A mall-intercept survey of 400 respondents was administered, where 200 respondents were of departmental stores and the other 200 were of hypermarket. This study identified four dimensions of customer satisfaction that is communication & assistance, store ambience, product availability & variety and services by exploratory factor analysis and validated them using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Multiple regressions were used to test the impact of these dimensions on shopping experience at departmental stores versus hypermarkets. This study validated the customer-satisfaction scale and examines the impact of customer-satisfaction constructs on customer shopping experience for departmental stores and hypermarkets. It confirms that impact of customer-satisfaction constructs on customer shopping experience at departmental stores is having greater variation compared to hypermarkets. The present study showed that the customer-satisfaction constructs are explaining the shopping experience more precisely at departmental stores than hypermarkets. This study provides new insight into customer satisfaction on customer shopping experience of departmental stores versus hypermarkets.