Price Differentiation in Online and Offline Retail: An Empirical Study of Current Practices

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is to present the practice of price differentiation in multichannel sales conditions. The study reviews the literature on channel pricing policy. The authors set a goal to study the practices of retailers operating in online and offline channels in Poland in terms of price differentiation between channels. Using the example of the EMPIK and SMYK chains, price differences between online and offline channels were analysed for several 100 products in key categories for these retailers. The prices were obtained by scraping the data from the websites of both retailers in November 2022. Statistical analysis was designed to examine differences in pricing by product category, position on the “most frequently purchased” list and price range. This research confirmed previous results that online vs. offline price differentiation was not widely used by leading multichannel retailers in the most popular categories bought online: only two out of 12 retailers elicited for the study were found to perform it. It also confirmed previous findings that if price differentiation was applied, the items were cheaper online more often. However, the average depth of discount was considerably higher. Apart from these general findings, our research delivered detailed insights at the category level as the depth of discount and the share of products sold at a discount online considerably differed between categories with comparable and non-comparable offers. Additionally, this study provided a unique analysis of the multichannel price differentiation strategy in relation to popularity or the absolute price of the product. While in the case of the popularity of the product, the offer uniqueness seemed to play a role, the relation to the absolute price of the product showed a mixed picture and would need further investigation.