Determinants of shopping experience : Exploring the mall shoppers of national capital region (NCR) of India

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the composition of “shopping experience” for shoppers in the metropolitan area of Delhi national capital region (Delhi NCR) in India.. Design/methodology/approach – The paper applies data reduction using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on a sample of 200 respondents drawn from four constituent urban clusters within the NCR and condenses a set of 22 mall attributes into a list of five comprehensible factors. Findings – The research shows that shoppers visualise shopping experience as a combination of five factors: ambience, physical infrastructure, marketing focus, convenience, and safety and security. They assigned different weightage in terms of significance to each of these factors. Internal configuration of these factors also reveals interesting patterns. Research limitations/implications – A non‐probability sampling method is applied in this research. Future studies should replicate the research in different social, economic and geographic contexts to see if the factor composition and structure remain unchanged. Practical implications – Mall developers in India should focus more on improving convenience and creating ambience. Disproportionate expenditure on adding to physical infrastructure is not expected to yield matching dividends. Social implications – The study assumes significance as India has seen a rapid mushrooming of shopping malls in the recent past. Such malls are struggling to attract shoppers. The paper explores the expectations of mall shoppers in Delhi NCR Originality/value – This paper is among the few works done on understanding Indian mall shoppers. It adds significantly to the meagre body of knowledge in this area in an Indian context.