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The primary aim of the research presented in this paper is to address the gap in the literature with regard to the factors that affect the uptake and application of e‐procurement within the public sector.

This analysis was achieved through five in‐depth case studies – based upon extensive interviews, observation and documentation reviews ‐ conducted within central and local government organisations.

The study shows that despite being very different in terms of their form and function, each of the five case study organisations had achieved similar levels of progress in terms of their adoption of e‐procurement technologies. In short every organisation had already adopted BACS, all five were also actively planning to implement: e‐tendering; e‐award; e‐contract and e‐catalogue systems, but none had any intention of adopting e‐marketplaces or e‐auctions.

The results of this study will help individual organisations to better understand their current situations and the barriers that will need to be overcome before they can significantly expand their adoption of e‐procurement technologies.

In addition to presenting one of the first detailed studies of the adoption of e‐procurement technologies, this study also breaks new ground through its use of the lens of “Institutional theory” to help interpret the findings.

Many traditional retailers use the internet as a complementary business channel and thus sell products through multiple channels. In contrast, “pure player” internet retailers only sell products via the internet. A proliferation of pure players over the past few years has intensified competition in the online shopping market and the question of who is better at offering physical distribution service quality (PDSQ), multi‐channel retailers or pure players, is open to debate. Despite PDSQ's importance in an electronic commerce environment there are few studies to date and most have focused on general service quality of internet shopping. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this phenomenon and posit a conceptual framework for further investigation.

This paper reviews the literature to develop variables and constructs for investigation following the first stage of Churchill's paradigm for scale development, which are presented in a framework based on the concept of order fulfilment as a key driver in electronic PDSQ, or e‐PDSQ.

The framework is presented for future investigation, thus there is no empirical study in this paper.

PDSQ has strategic importance for retailers to achieve competitive advantage and offer superior customer service, particularly for pure players as they are considered intangible services compared to their multi‐channel competitors. This importance also extends to the e‐commerce environment.

Earlier work has provided insight into how e‐PDSQ, represented by availability, timeliness and reliability, is affected by pricing, transactions and firms. This paper extends this work and presents an e‐PDSQ framework to investigate differences between multi‐channel and pure player retailers.

Twenty-first century online retailing has reshaped the retail landscape. Grocery shopping is emerging as the next fastest growing category in online retailing in the UK, having implications for the channels we use to purchase goods. Using Sainsbury’s data, the authors create a bespoke set of grocery click&collect catchments. The resultant catchments allow an investigation of performance within the emerging channel of grocery click&collect. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The spatial interaction method of “Huff gravity modeling” is applied in a semi-automated approach, used to calculate grocery click&collect catchments for 95 Sainsbury’s stores in England. The catchments allow investigation of the spatial variation and particularly rural-urban differences. Store and catchment characteristics are extracted and explored using ordinary least squares regression applied to investigate “demand per day” (a confidentiality transformed revenue value) as a function of competition, performance and geodemographic factors.

The findings show that rural stores exhibit a larger catchment extent for grocery click&collect when compared with urban stores. Linear regression finds store characteristics as having the greatest impact on demand per day, adhering to wider retail competition literature. Conclusions display a need for further investigation (e.g. quantifying loyalty).

New insights are contributed at a national level for grocery click&collect, as well as e-commerce, multichannel shopping and retail geography. Areas for further investigation are identified, particularly quantitatively capturing brand loyalty. The research has commercial impact as the catchments are being applied by Sainsbury’s to decide the next 100 stores and plan for the next five years of their grocery click&collect offering.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify why, when and how e-mail marketing can be used to empower consumers and to give ideas for future scholarly research.

Systematic literature review studies 41 e-mail marketing and 54 consumer empowerment articles published in variety of academic journals between 1998 and 2014.

E-mail allows an active, interactive and personalized communication fulfilling the preferences of an empowered consumer. E-mail marketing can be used to empower consumers by sending e-mails based on permission, by making consumers active participants in the communication process and by making e-mails relevant for the recipients. However, current e-mail marketing strategies need to be updated to get the maximum benefit out of the channel.

The limitation of the study is the broad domain of research, which hampered the in-depth analysis. However, the study was able to synthesize the scattered literature and create an overall picture of the topic as planned.

The paper encourages managers to use empowering e-mail marketing strategies and presents several suggestions for future e-mail marketing research.

The paper uses a new perspective, consumer empowerment as a lens for understanding e-mail marketing. Because e-mail marketing is currently very popular among marketers but is threatened by its negative image among consumers, it is important to understand how e-mail marketing can be developed so that it can also survive in the future.

To investigate the determinants of e‐commerce adoption in the retail sector using duration analysis.

The study proposes a conceptual model based on technology adoption and population ecology models. It identifies specific determinant factors organized under three areas: perceived benefits, organizational readiness, and external influences. Duration analysis is applied to data on 392 retailers.

Organizational readiness and external influences were the main driving factors of the adoption decision. There is no strong support for the perceived benefits construct. This suggests that e‐commerce adoption was to a great extent responsive to external pressures.

Major limitations include insufficient data. Future research can collect other types of data. Other extensions include the investigation of the effect of e‐commerce adoption, the construction of a formal theoretical model, and the collection of data from other countries.

The study provides guidelines to entry anticipation. It appears that many retailers mimetically responded to the online entry of other retailers. Managers should be also aware of the suitability of e‐commerce adoption to their organization. In order to be proactive, firms can put more emphasis on internal factors and rely less on outside signals in their strategies.

The paper investigates the e‐commerce adoption decision among retailers using a unique database collected from public sources, avoiding potential subjectivity bias. It traces the timing of e‐commerce adoption incorporating both fixed and time‐varying covariates.

Mobile applications, or apps, are an increasingly important part of omnichannel retailing. While the adoption and usage of apps for marketing purposes has grown exponentially over the past few years, there is little academic research in this area. The purpose of this paper is to examine how the mobile phone platform (Android vs Apple iOS), interest in the app and recency of store visit affect consumers’ likelihood to use the apps for purchasing and information-sharing activities.

The paper tests a model by analysing survey data collected from customers of a major US retailer using partial least squares regression.

The analysis finds that the level of interest in a retail app is positively related to the consumer's intention to engage in both purchasing and information-sharing activities. In addition, the recency of the consumer's last visit to the retail store has a moderating effect on both types of activities; the more recent the last visit, the larger the effect-size of interest in the app on intention to share information and make a purchase.

While marketing and advertising managers may have suspected that Apple iOS users are more receptive to retail mobile apps, this study provides empirical support for the proposition. In addition, the moderating effect of recency of visit suggests that in-store promotions may be effective in increasing usage of the retailer's mobile apps.

This study is among the first in the academic literature to examine predictors of mobile app usage for purchasing and information sharing. It fills a gap in the literature, while at the same time providing actionable information for practitioners.

Consumers have the multiple options to choose their products and services, which have a significant impact on the pattern of consumer decision making in digital market and further increases the challenges for the service providers to predict their buying pattern. In this sense, the purpose of this paper is to propose a structural hierarchy model for analyzing the changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital market by taking an Indian context.

To accomplish the objectives, the research is conducted in two phases. An extensive literature review is performed in the first phase to list the factors related to the changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital market and then fuzzy Delphi method is applied to finalize the factors. In the second phase, fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is employed to find the priority weights of finalized factors. The fuzzy set theory allows capturing the vagueness in the data.

The findings obtained in this study shows that consumers are much conscious about innovative and trendy products as well as brand and quality; therefore, the service providers must think about these two most important factors so that they can able to retain their consumer in their online portal.

The analysis shows that “innovative and trendy” is the first priority factor for the consumers followed by “brand and quality” and “fulfilment and time energy.” The proposed model can help the marketers and service providers in predicting customers’ preferences and their changing pattern efficiently under vague surroundings. The outcomes of this research work not only help the service provider to update their products and services according to consumers’ needs but can also help them to increase profit and minimize their risk.

This work contributes to consumer research literature focusing on problem evaluation in the context of changing pattern of consumer decision making in digital era.

Digitalization denotes an on-going transformation of great importance for the retail sector. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the phenomenon of the digitalization of retailing by developing a conceptual framework that can be used to further delineate current transformations of the retailer-consumer interface.

This paper develops a framework for digitalization in the retail-consumer interface that consists of four elements: exchanges, actors, offerings, and settings. Drawing on the previous literature, it describes and exemplifies how digitalization transforms each of these elements and identifies implications and proposals for future research.

Digitalization transforms the following: retailing exchanges (in a number of ways and in various facets of exchange, including communications, transactions, and distribution); the nature of retail offerings (blurred distinctions between products and services, what constitutes the actual offering and how it is priced); retail settings (i.e. where and when retailing takes place); and the actors who participate in retailing (i.e. retailers and consumers, among other parties).

The framework developed can be used to further delineate current transformations of retailing due to digitalization. The current transformation has created challenges for research, as it demands sensitivity to development over time and insists that categories that have been taken for granted are becoming increasingly blurred due to greater hybridity.

This paper addresses a significant and on-going transformation in retailing and develops a framework that can both guide future research and aid retail practitioners in analysing retailing’s current transformation due to digitalization.

Fast fulfilment is a key performance measure in online retail, and some retailers have achieved faster times by adopting new designs in their order fulfilment infrastructure. This research empirically confirms and quantifies the fulfilment time advantage that Amazon has achieved, relative to other online retailers. The purpose of this paper is to investigate three research questions: what is the overall mean fulfilment time difference between the new logistics designs of Amazon and the alternative designs of other retailers? For each order what is the distribution of the fulfilment time difference? What is the difference in fulfilment time by product category, price and size?

This research uses an empirical method to evaluate the fulfilment time performance of consumer orders made through the Amazon website and one or more competing online retailers. For 1,000 different products two fulfilment times, one at Amazon and another at a competing omnichannel retailer, are recorded. The analysis is then focused on the comparison between this paired data.

The research confirms that the new logistics methods, including physical facilities, distribution networks and intelligent order processing methods, have resulted in faster order fulfilment times. The performance, though, is not universally dominant and for 33 per cent of orders, the difference is 1 day or less. The fulfilment time difference varied by product, category, price or size.

The ongoing transformation of fulfilment and logistics operations at online retailers has generated several new research questions. This includes the need to confirm the fulfilment efficiency of the new designs and specify time targets. This paper identifies the fulfilment time gap between new and traditional operations. The results suggest that store-based or distribution centre-based fulfilment strategies may not match the new designs.

The study provides a quantitative analysis of the fulfilment time differentials in online retailing. The critical role of fulfilment logistics in the rapidly growing online retail industry can now be better modelled and studied. The survey method representing a single buyer allows for order pair equivalency and eliminates order bias. The results suggest that new warehousing and logistics designs can lead to significantly faster fulfilment times.

Many thousands of business related pages have been established on the World Wide Web (The Web) in the last five years. Some of the organisations that have published such pages have seen the Web as a medium of massive potential in the future. Despite this, actual direct sales from the web are still fairly low, especially amongst wine producers. A worldwide survey of vineyards with Web sites showed that there are many reasons for these low sales, including legal problems and transport of goods. However, the Vineyards appear confident that their investment will pay off, if not in direct sales then in terms of marketing benefit and cheap advertising. To date, the majority of vineyards questioned seem to be content. This paper discusses the main findings of the survey that produced these results.