Abstract
The conversion rate is the percentage of customers who enter a store and make a purchase. In this paper, we argue that a conversion rate defined by two stages (visit and purchase) is too rough to measure in many retail settings. Drawing on the idea of hierarchy-of-effect-models we propose a multi-stage framework, which decomposes conversion rates into four specific components with higher diagnostic value. Based on a qualitative and quantitative study in a retail context characterized by comparative shopping we demonstrate the usefulness of this approach. It is argued that our framework can be applied in a wide variety of settings in retail contexts of comparative shopping.