Digital retailing practices for triggering physical retailers’ bounce-back and bounce-forward performance against a great shock: evidence from the COVID-19 pandemic

This paper explores the mapping from specific digitalization practices to specific resilient performance against a great shock. Based on an adapted structure–conduct–performance framework, this paper hypothesizes by theoretically analyzing how the pre-shock establishment of digital retailing practices could trigger physical retailers’ bounce-back and bounce-forward performance against the COVID-19 crisis. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, the hypotheses are examined with a sample including 549 observations of 50 Chinese listed retailers from the first quarter of 2018 to the third quarter of 2020. The empirical results mainly indicate the following binary findings. First, regardless of the differences in triggering bounce-back performance, different digital retailing practices are found to be effective in triggering physical retailers’ bounce-forward performance against the COVID-19 crisis. This somewhat addresses the concern about the temporality of digitalization-enabled resilience by revealing the generality across digital retailing practices in the sense of triggering resilient performance. Second, it is shown that physical retailers’ bounce-back performance at a specific stage of the COVID-19 crisis could only be triggered by digital retailing practices that coincidentally apply to the shock-induced market structure changes at the stage. The results emphasize each digitalization practice’s individuality in triggering resilient performance. This justifies the non-negligibility of the direct mapping from specific digitalization practices to specific resilient performance in digitalization-enabled resilience evaluation.