168 Managing Multichannel Integration, Designing Perceived Affordances, and Developing Customer Relationship in the Online and Offline Retailing relational value (Wu and Chang, 2016). For example, with data integration across channels, retailers can paint clear portraits of customers’ behaviors, purchasing patterns, and trends. Retailers can identify, understand, and respond to the best customers (Stone et al., 2002), thus cultivating deep and long-term relationships with these customers. The interaction that arises in these relationships forms the social bond within which relational value is boosted (Yang, Liu, and Wei, 2016). As a result, we propose our second hypothesis as follows. H2: Multichannel integration has a positive influence on relational value. 2.3 Perceived Affordances, Economic Value, and Relational Value Affordances are a powerful theoretical lens to view the relationships between subject actors and objectives via mediated artifacts (Gibson, 1979; Tang and Zhang, 2020). Affordances are perceived by humans when information is available in an ambient light (Gibson, 1979). Perceived affordances refer to human perceptions of possibilities for actions through cues in specific environments, and have better influences on customers’ experiences than real affordances (Lee, Lee, and Hwang, 2014; Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, and Azad, 2013; Tang and Zhang, 2020). The theory of perceived affordances is important in the field of human machine interface interaction, which is primarily concerned with how the properties of human machine interface influence their interactions with each other (Tang and Zhang, 2020). Norman (2013) stresses an integrated view that encompasses action possibilities and delivery through customer-centered design, which promotes customer behaviors in specific environments. As Hutchby (2003) notes, affordances provide functional and relational features that build possibilities for customer actions with respect to an object. Fang (2019) argues that affordances are in the form of visibility, persistence, interactivity, association, and selectivity, with their values developed to adapt to the settings of specific environments. Because of the technology trends, previous research widely discusses about information technology affordance and technology affordance (Dong and Wang 2018; Majchrzak et al., 2013). In this study, we extend the observation of affordances to offlineonline interaction design since perceived affordances highlight the essential elements for the interaction design of multichannel retailers, especially the mapping between their online and offline components (Gibbs, Rozaidi, and Eisenberg, 2013). Information technology and technology affordance have been discussed in specific
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