The COVID-19 pandemic served as a significant shock to the global retail landscape, forcing physical retailers to adapt rapidly to survive. While digital transformation has been presented as a solution for building resilience, the effectiveness of different digitalization practices in triggering resilient performance against such a great shock remains under-explored. Previous research often focuses on general digital resilience capabilities, overlooking the specific digitalization practices and their unique contributions to various forms of resilient performance. This study addresses these gaps by examining the direct mapping from specific digital retailing practices to resilient performance, focusing on "bounce-back" (ability to weather the immediate crisis) and "bounce-forward" (ability to adapt and thrive post-crisis) performance. The study specifically focuses on the Chinese retail market during the initial stages of the COVID-19 pandemic, a context characterized by drastic shifts in consumer behavior and market dynamics. The selection of the Chinese market is strategic because of its unique characteristics like the rapid development of e-commerce and the large number of brick-and-mortar stores. The importance of this study lies in its ability to provide practical insights into how specific digitalization strategies can bolster resilience against unforeseen events, allowing retailers to prepare for future uncertainties.

Existing literature highlights the role of digitalization in building firm resilience, showcasing how capabilities such as absorptive, adaptive, and transformative resilience can help firms sustain operations during uncertain events. However, a critical gap exists in understanding the specific link between individual digitalization practices and observable resilient performance, particularly against great shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies often analyze composite digitalization strategies or capabilities, lacking the granularity needed to assess the effectiveness of individual practices. The study acknowledges the need to move beyond assessing digital resilience capabilities in general and instead focus on directly observable resilient performance, which is separated into bounce-back and bounce-forward performance. Existing research on the impacts of different digitalization practices is limited, and this study bridges that gap by focusing on the direct connections between these practices and the specific resilient outcomes they generate.

This study employs a difference-in-differences (DID) strategy, analogous to vaccine trial methodologies, to assess the impact of pre-shock digital retailing practices on retailers' performance during and after the COVID-19 crisis. The study uses a retailer-quarter panel data set comprising 549 observations of 50 listed general merchandise retailers in China from 2018Q1 to 2020Q3. The data is obtained from the Choice SSE and SZSE Stock Database and annual reports. Four digital retailing practices are considered: online-to-offline food delivery services (O2OFDS) and social media marketing services (SMMS), each implemented on either proprietary platforms (PP) or large third-party platforms (TP). The outcome variables are asset turnover (AT) and its components (sales growth, current asset growth, and illiquid asset growth). The analysis includes treatment variables representing the pre-shock establishment of the four digital retailing practices, placebo treatment variables for possibly overlapping business practices, and control variables for firm-level factors and regional variations. A DID regression model is used to estimate the average treatment effects on the treated (ATTs), capturing the impact of each digital retailing practice on the outcome variables. To validate the results, a parallel trends test is conducted to ensure that treatment and control groups showed similar trends before the intervention. In addition to the quantitative analysis, six semi-structured interviews with executives from selected retailers are conducted to provide qualitative evidence and contextual understanding. This mixed-methods approach strengthens the reliability and validity of the findings.

The study's main findings reveal a nuanced relationship between digital retailing practices and resilient performance. First, the pre-shock establishment of O2OFDS-PP and SMMS-PP did not significantly trigger bounce-back performance, likely due to a mismatch between proprietary platforms and consumers' initial preference for high-visibility, high-capacity channels offered by large third-party platforms. In contrast, O2OFDS-TP significantly improved sales growth throughout the crisis, while SMMS-TP showed a positive impact on sales growth only in the later stages, indicating a need for different strategies for immediate crisis management and adapting to evolving consumer preferences. Second, regarding bounce-forward performance, the study finds that all four digital retailing practices had positive impacts, reducing illiquid asset growth, which implies that companies could reduce investment in physical spaces and shift to online sales. This indicates that general engagement in digital retailing, regardless of specific platform choice or service type, enables quick market sensing and facilitates the transformation towards omnichannel operations. Further analysis using an event study approach supports the findings, showing significant positive ATTs for O2OFDS-TP and SMMS-TP on sales growth in the immediate aftermath of the COVID-19 outbreak and a gradual fade of this effect over time. The analysis on illiquid assets growth shows the effect of O2OFDS-TP and SMMS-TP in reducing these assets and suggests a long-term effect of these strategies.

The findings address the concern about the temporality of digitalization-enabled resilience by highlighting that diverse digitalization practices can contribute to resilient performance. While bounce-back performance is highly context-specific, requiring a coincidental match between the practice and temporary market structure changes, bounce-forward performance demonstrates a degree of generality. The positive impact of various digital retailing practices on bounce-forward performance is particularly significant, suggesting that even passive engagement in digital retailing empowers firms with capabilities to sense market shifts and reconfigure operations effectively. The observed positive effect of O2OFDS-TP and SMMS-TP on bounce-back performance is likely a result of operational redundancy that strengthens resilience capabilities. The study's emphasis on specific digitalization practices instead of composite strategies is a crucial contribution to the resilience literature.

This paper contributes significantly to the understanding of digitalization-enabled resilience by revealing both the context-specific nature of bounce-back performance and the generality of bounce-forward performance triggered by various digital retailing practices. The findings underscore the necessity of analyzing specific digitalization practices rather than composite strategies in evaluating resilience. For managers, this highlights the importance of proactively engaging in digitalization to enhance long-term adaptability, while acknowledging the limited effectiveness of specific practices in immediate crisis response. Future research could explore the generalizability of these findings across other great shocks and different geographic contexts.

The study's limitations include its focus on a specific industry (general merchandise retailers) and geographic context (China), which may limit the generalizability of the findings. The qualitative data, while providing valuable contextual insights, are limited in scope and thus do not allow for generalizable conclusions. Further research is needed to investigate the interplay of multiple digital retailing practices and to explore the long-term implications of these practices beyond the immediate post-pandemic period.