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Top1. Introduction
Due to widespread access to the internet, increasing mobile phone penetration, and developed information systems, channel switching behaviour has become a common phenomenon (Arora & Sahney, 2018; Verhoef et al., 2007). Webrooming has emerged as a frequent consumer behaviour relating to channel selection where consumers search information over online platforms before making a final purchase from offline stores (Frasquet et al., 2015; Flavián et al., 2016; Fernández et al., 2018; Wong et al., 2018; Aw, 2019; Flavián et al., 2020; Shankar & Jain, 2020). According to a Price waterhouse Coopers’ (PwC) recent report, a large number of consumers visit a company's website to collect information before purchasing a product or availing of services from the company's offline store (PwC, 2015). According to the Deloitte (2017) report, more than 69% of consumers search for products and services online before purchasing them offline. Further, more than 72% of The United States of America (USA) consumers search for product information over online platforms before purchasing from physical stores (D'Avanzo & Pilato, 2015). The majority of the purchases at physical stores is the outcome of the consumers’ web activities (Flavián et al., 2016). Due to separate accounting books for online and offline channels and webrooming behaviour, marketers are facing massive channel conflict (Aw, 2020). Nevertheless, scholars argue that consumers who are active on different online platforms, perceive several search benefits motivate consumers to search the information about product and services over online platforms (Frasquet et al., 2015). Additionally, in recent times, digital technologies metaphorically change consumer engagement, a psychological state of mind to interact frequently with a brand or a medium, with marketers from offline to online medium (Harmeling et al., 2017; Brodie et al., 2019; Ferreira et al., 2020; Thakur, 2018). Now a day, consumer engagement with online platforms play a crucial role in forming consumer behavioural intention (Morgan-Thomas et al., 2020). Consumer online engagement is the outcome of several hedonic, emotional, social, and utilitarian values that consumers receive over online platforms (Mazaheri et al., 2010; Park et al., 2012; Mehra et al., 2013).