T he recent growth of e-commerce technologies has disrupted the traditional retail environment, leading to more consumers shopping online. While the manner in which consumers shop is changing rapidly, our understanding of how changing consumer behaviors affect retail supply chain management is lacking. In particular, our understanding of how consumers react to stockouts in an online shopping environment remains unclear. Making the challenge even more difficult is the fact that price promotions are heavily used to attract consumers in an online retail environment where consumer switching costs are low. This research develops a theoretical framework, based on expectation-disconfirmation theory, to explain the effect of price promotions on consumer expectations of product availability and their reactions to stockouts in an online retail environment. Surprisingly, our findings suggest that consumers are actually less dissatisfied with a stockout of a price promoted item than a nonprice promoted product and are less likely to switch to another retailer's website. These findings may suggest that price promotions actually create a type of switching cost in the online retail environment, leading to interesting implications for researchers and supply chain managers.

A prevalent challenge for online retail supply chain managers is maintaining and managing adequate inventory levels to support and fulfill consumer orders and purchases. Interestingly, this challenge is not only about maintaining inventory availability, but also how to effectively disclose and communicate inventory availability, particularly if a stockout occurs. This article investigates a conceptual model that explores the impact of online inventory availability disclosure on consumer perceptions in the context of a stockout. Based on expectation disconfirmation theory, the core of the model is the notion that limited inventory availability would stimulate expected consumer competition, which in turn, causes consumers to not be as negatively impacted by stockouts. Contrary to this prediction, however, the results of this experimental study show that consumers are actually more dissatisfied when low inventory availability items are out‐of‐stock. This is likely due to the combined impacts of a stockout encounter and a “loss” of a competitive shopping scenario. Thus, implications of these findings for future research and supply chain practice are offered accordingly.

To prevent customers from leaving stores empty‐handed when encountering a stockout, retailers increasingly leverage their inventory visibility and order fulfillment capabilities to implement “save the sale” tactics. Retailers have several logistics service options available in designing “save the sale” stockout recovery initiatives: “buy at store—ship from (different) store” and the “buy at store—ship from DC,” leading to different order fulfillment speeds. In addition, there is the home delivery approach, which is generally more convenient to customers than the option of store delivery for customer pick‐up. In this paper, we explore how customers evaluate and respond to varying elements of these “save the sale” stockout recovery services when experiencing an in‐store stockout. Building on justice theory and literatures on service recovery and impression formation, we develop a series of four experiments. We explain and provide empirical evidence for (1) why and how customers assess specific stockout service recovery dimensions (i.e., order fulfillment speed and delivery location) as more just, (2) how customers appraise the justice of these bundled stockout recovery dimensions, (3) how purchase involvement and monetary offers impact these perceptions, and (4) how justice perceptions and stockout recoveries impact the likelihood of “saving the sale.”

End-consumers have become significantly prevalent in the contemporary supply chain management (SCM) dialogue. Due, in part, to the rapid development of mobile technologies and the growing emphasis on online retail order fulfillment and omni-channel SCM, there has been a shift toward more research on consumer-oriented SCM practices in the academic literature. This fairly new, but growing, body of research that has contributed to our understanding of the link between SCM and consumers has proliferated, yet without an overarching theory-driven conceptualization to connect to. The purpose of this article is to address this gap in the literature by providing a comprehensive review of research that has focused directly on consumer issues in SCM, and in doing so, present a conceptual model to add structure and clarity to this body of work. Based on themes that emerged from the literature, we propose the concept of “consumer-based supply chain management performance” as a framework to represent this research domain. Moreover, in presenting the framework and associated categories, future research opportunities are suggested, with the aim of further contributing to the growth, development, and structure of this contemporary SCM dialogue.

In response to consumers' growing interest in how products are sourced, produced, and distributed, organizations are increasingly transparent about their supply chain sustainability practices. Supply chain transparency (SCT) efforts are intended to signal positive information about the company to consumers but the benefits are often unclear, especially when consumers receive multiple, but mixed signals that include negative events. We draw on signaling theory to explore how consumers develop impressions of a company's products based on different evaluative dimensions: the positive integrity signal of SCT and the negative capability signal of a product recall. The incongruent signal set creates ambiguity for consumers in assessing product quality and subsequent purchase decisions. We develop two scenario‐based experiments to test aspects of interdimensional signal incongruence. Experiment 1 investigates the magnitude of signal incongruity by considering combinations of different levels of SCT and product recall severity. Experiment 2 investigates the temporal effect of the incongruent signals, considering the restorative effect of SCT after a product recall signal has been received. While product recall signals are salient for consumers in shaping perceptions of product quality and purchase intentions across both experiments, we demonstrate the strategic value of SCT as a positive integrity signal to consumers.