Purpose – Nowadays some consumers consider themselves as “omnichannels” – they combine both physical
and digital channels expecting a seamless shopping experience – since they view their shopping process from a
multiple-channel viewpoint. Giving that situation, the aim of this paper is to test the role of consumers’
omnichannel tendency (omni-tendency) in the information processing in the digital channel.
Design/methodology/approach – Based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), emotions as well as
utilitarian and hedonic experiences are proposed to understand consumer attitude towards the digital store.
Through a survey, data were collected from 284 digital shoppers. PLS path modelling and PLS-MGA were used
to test the research hypotheses.
Findings – The results confirm that emotions positively affect the evaluation of the experiences, which in turn
improves the attitude towards the digital store. Focusing on the differences among consumers, the findings
show that for consumers with low omni-tendency the emotions are key to improve the evaluation of their
experiences. Moreover, regarding the attitude, consumers with more omni-tendency follow the central route to
process the information; and consumers with less omni-tendency follow the peripheral route.
Originality/value – This paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, this research includes the
study of omni-tendency, as a consumer trait, in the information processing developed in the digital channel,
ignored in the literature. Second, this work contributes to information processing theories in digital context
confirming, specifically the applicability of ELM into the omnichannel context. This offers support to the
application of traditional theories to explain new phenomena. Third, and in line with the previous contribution,
this work goes a step further in understanding ELM theory by including other constructs –the omni-tendency
and emotions– to explain the information processing in the digital context.
