Towards understanding network relationships in online retailing

This paper views e-commerce (B2C) as a retail innovation that evolves along with newly emerging technological system around the Internet. In the case of e-commerce, this system consists of retailers as adopters and co-developers of technological solutions invented/commercialized by specialists. As part of 'new economy' business practices, what is needed for establishing successful e-commerce venture in terms of tangible resources and competences is not necessarily acquired internally but are coordinated via network relationships. The paper proposes to identify different e-commerce strategies, and outlines the kinds of actors involved in the networks that seem to go along with each strategy. While suggesting that different e-commerce strategies correspond to different networking strategies it points at the importance of relational competences in varying online retailing contexts.     

Acceptance of recommendations to buy in online retailing

Nowadays, many online shops try to improve their customer service by personalization. Personal welcomings, individual assistance as well as recommendations to inform and buy are getting an integral part of the customer communication. These new elements are assumed to increase the retailer's share of wallet and – ideally at the same time – the customer's satisfaction with the online shop. However, till date only few studies have analyzed which external factors influence the customer's acceptance of such assistance. This paper closes this gap by an experiment, where a modified Technology Acceptance Model is used for measuring the customer's acceptance. Volunteers are offered an online shopping experience with individually generated recommendations to buy. The results show a high acceptance of the generated recommendations and how close this acceptance is connected to the quality and shopping relevance of the recommendations. Even though the results are limited to the specific recommendation types used, they give important implications for an adequate design of modern online shops.     

Neighborhood effects and trial on the internet: Evidence from online grocery retailing

For traditional retailers the customer pool is largely bounded in space, whereas an Internet retailer can obtain customers from a wide geographical area. We examine customer trials at Netgrocer.com, and drawing on studies in marketing and economics conjecture that exposure spatially to proximate others (through direct social interaction or observation), can influence decisions of those who have yet to try. Trials arise from utility-maximizing behavior and the model is estimated as a discrete time hazard. The data span: (1) 29,701 residential zip codes, (2) 45 months of transactions since inception, and (3) zip code contiguity relationships. The estimated neighborhood effect is significantly positive and economically meaningful.

The link between customer satisfaction and price sensitivity: An investigation of retailing industry in Taiwan

Are customers less likely to seek bargains once they are satisfied with a product and service? This study examines the relationship between customer satisfaction and price sensitivity. Specifically, satisfaction is divided into economic satisfaction derived from tangible products and social satisfaction provided by service encounters. This survey of 248 retailer–consumer dyads shows that economic satisfaction is negatively associated with price sensitivity. However, social satisfaction is positively related with price sensitivity, especially for female customers and customers with high patronage frequency. Interpersonal relationships emphasized in the Chinese collectivist societies tend to influence customers' price sensitivity. These findings have many implications for researchers and practitioners in the retail sector.     

The geographical dimension of global retailing

The globalization of twenty well-known retailers and fast food operators is measured by two geographical indices, dispersion and locus, based on various measures of activity. Both are compared with similar indices based on the GDP. An attempt to explain varying degrees of globalization with own manufacturing, store ownership and company age fails. This leads to increasingly ‘soft’ verbal, even personalized, explanations.     

The impact of digital transformation on the retailing value chain

Consumers have traditionally made purchase decisions at the store shelf, giving institutional brick-and-mortar retailers great power to learn about and influence behaviors and preferences. With the rise of e-commerce, mobile shopping, and most recently smart technologies, new competitors threaten this long-standing supremacy. Adopting a value-creation perspective, we analyze how digitization started the erosion of institutional retailing as the primary interface to the customer. We develop a framework that identifies five new sources of value creation and propose how these advance and transform competition for this interface. Depending on the importance of the new sources of value creation (in different purchase situations), stationary retailing may prevail as an important interaction point in a multichannel decision journey. However, increasing diffusion of branded-product platforms including connected devices and online retail platforms is shifting this authority to new players. For the parties involved in this multilayered competition, acknowledging the changes and actively managing their position in the evolving eco-systems is crucial.     

Internationalization of retailing operations

International retail operations may be defined as the operation, by a firm or alliance, of shops, or other forms of retail distribution, in more than one country. Such operations have an extensive history. Motives for retailers to operate internationally are considered. Theoretical explanations have not been well developed but a potentially useful framework exists with the transaction cost paradigm. International operations may be achieved within several different organizational structures with some firms adopting different approaches for different markets. The empirical evidence of international retail activity lacks a sound survey base but some tentative generalities are drawn.     

A promotion mix budgeting model for retailing

Our two-equation model of retail promotion provides a well-balanced explanation of both retailers' perceptions of promotion tools and their budget allocation across the promotion mix. While previous studies have examined each of these two components separately, few have integrated both in the one study. Factor analysis was used to simplify the choices of promotion tools. This reduced the number of promotion tools to four, namely mass media, in-store promotion, sales promotion/direct mail and personal selling. We support earlier studies which link budget promotion mix spending (behaviour) to perceptions about the effectiveness of each medium (attitude). The range of determinants of perceptions has been extended by incorporating the roles of retail strategy, store ownership, culture and promotion intensity. We have estimated the budget promotion mix equation using a production function theoretical framework. Although this makes little difference to the strong relationship between retailers' perceptions of promotion tools and budget allocations, the theoretical framework does enable formal estimation of cross-media substitution. We find that the two short-term oriented promotion media are substitutes. Our model has been applied to apparel retailing in Australia, with considerable scope for applications to other retail categories and to other countries.     

零售业自有品牌的创新与开发

零售企业开发自有品牌的 必要性 1,提高商店形象与顺各忠诚度的需要.随着自有品牌的发展,提高消费者忠诚度和树立商店形象必须成为一个主要的长期考虑因素.     

The organizational ecology of retailing: A historical perspective

Little empirical research has been done on how to help retailing firms survive recessions. Using the “natural experiment” of the Great Depression and the theoretical lens of organizational ecology, we explore survival of retailers during 1929-1939 to test whether strategic competitive advantages related to human capital, the liability of newness, organizational form, and legitimacy facilitated survival through this upheaval. Consistent with theory from organizational ecology, survival was positively influenced by the average wage paid in the population, the average age of the population, chain store penetration, and an interaction of level of chain store penetration and age. The study offers recommendations for research and practice to retailers. The most important application for retailing managers is that high wage employees, presumably of higher quality, help retailers survive recessions better than low wage employees.     

The globalization of retailing: volumes I and II

As a form of crisis management, business continuity management (BCM) has evolved since the 1970s in response to the technical and operational risks that threaten an organisation's recovery from hazards and interruptions. This paper examines the development of business practices related to crisis management alongside the emergence of legislation, regulations and standards (drivers) requiring organisations to implement specific business continuity activities. From the resulting historical review, three distinct phases of management practice and four phases in the development of drivers are identified, revealing the influence of events over governance, the internationalisation of influence, and organisational resilience as a meta-institution.     

Entertainment in retailing: The influences of advanced technologies

In recent years, the importance of an enjoyable experience during the shopping activity increased. As a consequence, many researchers are focusing on the best application of enjoyable elements in the points of sale in order to maintain existing consumers and attract new ones.The aim of this paper is to analyze how the introduction of advanced technologies modifies the retailing context and affects consumers shopping experience. In particular, three aspects of our results emerge from a theoretical standpoint: new advantages for retailers (the possibility to achieve fast information on consumer behavior and preferences); the improvement of the point of sale; and the positive influences on consumers shopping experience.     

Multi-channel service retailing: The effects of channel performance satisfaction on behavioral intentions

The number of channels that retailers can use interchangeably to provide customer service has increased. We report on a study of clients of a large retail bank that investigates the channel performance satisfaction-behavioral intentions relationship when the traditional service channel (i.e., branch office) is extended with technology-mediated channels (i.e., internet banking and telephone banking). For routine services, our findings suggest that behavioral intentions are most strongly influenced by satisfaction with office-related performance factors. For nonroutine services, satisfaction with service employee performance is the most significant driver of intentions. Our analysis also reveals interaction effects between traditional and technology-mediated channel performance satisfaction levels. These effects vary across service types, indicating contingencies in channel substitution and complementarity.     

A predictive investigation of first-time customer retention in online reservation services

This paper reports a predictive investigation of first-time customer retention in an emerging service business—online reservation services. We work with an online platform that enables customers to make reservations for various types of restaurants. With numerous first-time users on the platform, the focal company is eager to effectively identify recurring customers. However, the business problem is challenging due to that each first-time customer has one and only one booking record hinders the use of well-established marketing models that demand multiple booking records for a customer. By analyzing more than 100,000 observations, we extract booking-related features that are useful in predicting first-time customer retention. Our feature extraction is potentially applicable to other service sectors (e.g., hotel, travel) with similar booking information fields (e.g., reservation timing, party size). We further conduct a comparative study in which surprisingly, the seemingly simplistic generalized additive model (GAM) for our test cases consistently outperforms computationally intensive ensemble learning methods, even the cutting-edge XGBoost. Our analysis indicates that there is no silver bullet for applied predictive modeling and GAM should definitely be included in the arsenal of business researchers. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study for online service providers and business data analytics.     

The dynamics of online word-of-mouth and product sales—An empirical investigation of the movie industry

There are growing interests in understanding how word-of-mouth (WOM) on the Internet is generated and how it influences consumers’ purchase decisions at retail outlets. A unique aspect of the WOM effect is the presence of a positive feedback mechanism between WOM and retail sales. We characterize the process through a dynamic simultaneous equation system, in which we separate the effect of online WOM as both a precursor to and an outcome of retail sales. We apply our approach to the movie industry, showing that both a movie's box office revenue and WOM valence significantly influence WOM volume. WOM volume in turn leads to higher box office performance. This positive feedback mechanism highlights the importance of WOM in generating and sustaining retail revenue.     

Opportunities for active stock-out management in online stores: The impact of the stock-out policy on online stock-out reactions

This paper investigates the impact of an online retailer's stock-out policy on consumers’ category purchase and choice decisions. We investigate three different policies: (1) stock-outs are immediately visible and there are no replacement suggestions, (2) stock-outs are only visible after purchase attempts and (3) stock-outs are immediately visible but a replacement item is suggested. Results from an online grocery shopping experiment reveal that the adopted stock-out policy has a significant impact on both decisions. Making stock-outs not immediately visible creates confusion and intensifies the consumer's loss experience, thereby reducing the tendency to buy in the category. Suggesting a replacement item, in contrast, facilitates the substitution decision and slightly reduces the purchase cancellation rate. It also substantially increases the suggested item's choice probability. Yet, this effect disappears when higher-priced - suspicious - items are suggested. Overall, these results indicate that online grocery retailers have an interest in pursuing open and convenience-oriented stock-out policies.