Does loss-leader pricing pricing work in online shopping malls?

As online shopping malls have emerged as a substantial shopping channel, they have used various sales promotion strategies to acquire new customers. Most of these strategies have been applied by offline malls for years. One, loss-leader pricing, is a type of promotional pricing in which stores sell well known products below their marginal cost, in order to attract customers and induce them to purchase more goods through impulse buying. This strategy is based on the expectation that customers will factor transaction costs into their purchasing decisions. However, its application to online malls fails to recognize that transaction costs are lower online, and that customers will behave differently as a result. Our study predicts that loss-leader pricing will not work online because online malls entail lower searching and moving costs than offline malls. The study examines the effectiveness of loss-leader pricing with empirical data from a survey as well as log data from a Korean online shopping mall. The results show that while loss-leader pricing does attract customers to online shopping malls, it encourages cherry-picking rather than impulse purchases of regular-price goods.