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In an increasingly technology-driven retail landscape, retailers face the challenge of making the most effective decisions regarding the selection and use of innovative technology. Although previous research provides insights into the added value of technology, it does not directly guide retailers in overviewing and selecting technology that supports their sales operations. This chapter contributes to the field of retail technology studies by introducing a sales-oriented model intended to assist retailers in inventorying available technologies and making decisions regarding the selection and use of these technologies for their physical stores. The model uses an updated version of the seven steps of selling as a foundation and, in line with the resource life cycle, decision support system and self-service technology literature streams, proposes applying technology in such a way that it supports the stages of the retailer's sales process. This chapter concludes with a discussion of practical guidelines for applying the model.

To provide insight into the role and design of delivery services to address CO₂, NO _x , and PM₁₀ emissions from passenger travel.

A simulated North American data sample is served with three transportation structures: last-mile personal vehicles, local-depot-based truck delivery, and regional-warehouse-based truck delivery. CO₂, NO _x , and PM₁₀ emissions are modeled using values from the US EPA’s MOVES model and are added to an ArcGIS optimization scheme.

Local-depot-based truck delivery requires the lowest amount of vehicle miles traveled (VMT), and last-mile passenger travel generates the lowest levels of CO₂, NO _x , and PM₁₀. While last-mile passenger travel requires the highest amount of VMT, the efficiency gains of the delivery services are not large enough to offset the higher pollution rate of the delivery vehicle as compared to personal vehicles.

This research illustrates the clear role delivery structure and logistics have in impacting the CO₂, NO _x , and PM₁₀ emissions of goods transportation in North America.

This research illustrates tension between goals to reduce congestion (via VMT reduction) and CO₂, NO _x , and PM₁₀ emissions.

This chapter provides additional insight into the role of warehouse location in achieving sustainability targets and provides a novel comparison between delivery and personal travel for criteria pollutants.

The purpose of this chapter is to identify and analyze various critical success factors (CSFs) that can facilitate retailing business in Thailand. This chapter further aims to understand the mutual interactions among these CSFs through identification of the hierarchical relationships among them. A framework for Thai retailers has been developed, wherein the hierarchical interrelationships between identified CSFs have been presented and interpreted using total interpretive structural modeling (TISM). Cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification analysis has been further employed to identify the driving power as well as dependence power of these CSFs. In the present research, 15 CSFs have been identified through literature review and expert opinions. The methodology employed in this study provides a mechanism to conduct an exploratory study by identifying the factors and analyzing their interactions through the development of a hierarchical framework. The proposed framework developed through qualitative modeling is an effort to understand relevant factors that can apply to the Thai retailers. This study makes a significant contribution in the literature of retailing business, which captures the perspective of different customers.

Buying online has become a widespread and common activity for consumers, and, for many organizations, e-commerce has become a very profitable alternative to sell their products and services, also allowing them to leverage their strategy in new geographical markets immediately. Although the literature on the subject is comprehensive, there is a gap in identifying the holistic constructs that are the determinants of consumers' choice of an online store. This research resorts to an exploratory study, based on a nonsystematic literature review, seeking to identify these constructs. The results obtained allowed us to identify the following constructs: consumer behavior, customer experience, web content, catalog, terms and conditions, customer support, perceived value, trust, security and privacy, satisfaction, and loyalty. Customer experience, satisfaction, and loyalty constructs stand out from a strategic perspective.

Scholarship on alternative organizations and cooperatives has argued that networks and intermediaries foster organizational form stability and protect collectivist-democratic organizations from rationalization as well as decoupling. This study of field-level organizing among food co-ops in the United States shows that rather than buffering collectivist organizations from conventional market and rationalization pressures, meta-organizations can also serve as a conduit for rationalizing pressures, subjecting vulnerable organizations to what I call quasi-coercive isomorphism. Using interviews of field participants, ethnographic observations of conferences, and content analysis of organizational documents, I examine the formation and impact of National Co+op Grocers, a meta-cooperative created to leverage scale and pool resources among food co-ops. I find that this meta-organization enforced grocery industry-oriented norms of operation, management, and presentation among its member organizations in return for providing mutual liability and economies of scale. This focus on select operationally scalable processes and structures for support generated isomorphic pressures that exposed, rather than sheltered, co-ops, especially smaller, resource-poor ones, from industry standards. The meta-organization thus promoted a sectorized model of more marketized practices for the field’s cooperatives that pushed co-ops to adopt conventional grocery store practices and distanced them from the practices of other cooperative form fields. Moreover, the potential of cooperative form-specific elements for scaling was not realized: collective ownership and democratic governance remained local concerns. These findings suggest that whether meso-level cooperation among cooperatives can support alternative form maintenance is contingent on the structure and scope of the meta-organization and on the perceived scalability of operational and governance elements of the cooperative organizational form.

Inner city centers not only provide opportunities for shopping, dining, and entertainment, but with their lively atmosphere and other vital attributes, also create attractive destinations for residents and tourists alike. However, inner city retailing, potentially the most important reason to visit an inner city, is facing serious competition from e-commerce and out-of-town shopping malls. Dying inner city centers have become a severe issue in recent years, worldwide. To counteract this devastating trend and ensure the vitality and viability of inner city centers, stakeholders from the public and private sectors regularly join their forces in initiatives to strengthen urban structures. However, academic insights into the contribution of retailing on perceived city attractiveness remain sparse. Relying on an extensive data set that combines survey and observational data, the authors are able to quantify a variety of inner city characteristics, ranging from its store and service provider portfolio to its ambience and accessibility, and measure their association with its perceived attractiveness. They show that a city's portfolio of retail stores is not only related to people's perceptions of the city's overall attractiveness but also perceptions of its ambience. However, not all retail categories contribute the same way; while the presence of clothing stores or booksellers is strongly associated with cities' ambience as well as attractiveness, other retail categories such as optometrists or electronics stores are negatively associated with consumers' inner city perceptions. Importantly, these relationships also depend on the size of the focal city. Based on their results, the authors provide important managerial and societal implications on how to leverage the local retailing environment to improve inner city attractiveness. For example, the results may inform (local) governments on which sectors to subsidize in order to attract those store and service provider categories that benefit inner city attractiveness.

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of online price dispersion in Europe, across a broad range of product categories and countries. Using the dominant European price comparison site we collected firm specific prices, weekly, from seven European countries (Denmark, France, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom) for 31 unique products, falling into five distinct product categories (printers, PDAs, scanners, games consoles, computer games and music), over the nine-month period October 2001 to June 2002. The resulting data set comprises over 17,000 individual price observations.

Using a number of alternative measures of price dispersion we find significant differences in the degree of price dispersion observed in online markets, both between countries and across product categories. We consider alternative explanations for online price dispersion and analyze their significance in explaining the observed differences.

The topics of this chapter are quite fundamental for the book. The chapter deals with value in B2B; what is value, what creates value, how could value be identified, estimated, and exploited. For these reasons, the chapter presents a value calculation model and carries out a critical discussion of the meaningfulness of doing such calculations.

A second theme is a discussion about solution sales relative to product sales and also systems selling. We also provide a comparison between business ventures focusing on selling goods, a goods-dominant logic, relative to services, a service-dominant logic. This comparison is made with reference to the two underlying themes of the book, the solution-oriented business and the continuously ongoing organizing activities.

Skincare, hair care, make-up, perfumes, toiletries and deodorants, and oral cosmetics are the main product categories of the cosmetic market. Since the early twentieth century, the production of cosmetics and beauty products has been controlled by a handful of multi-national corporations. COVID-19 impacted the cosmetics industry in several different and sometimes conflicting ways. This study benchmarks the performance of 20 largest cosmetics companies against their competition as well as against their previous years to analyze the impact of COVID-19. We find that only one company has consistently performed than its peers over the period of 2015–2020. We also find that average efficiency score of cosmetics companies declines in 2020 relative to 2019.

The field of transportation research, and the World Conferences on Transport Research Society (WCTRS), has an illustrious history. The challenge today is to look to the future in a deep and thoughtful way, to identify emerging issues and opportunities for practice and for research.

This chapter identifies several critical issues in transportation research. We then explore one issue in depth, the need to increase individual and collaborative effectiveness.

This issue points to the need for a new direction in transportation research. Historically, transportation research has focussed on two major thrusts. The analysis thrust has focussed on predicting the consequences of a given transportation plan, project, or service proposal. Associated “design” research has dealt with algorithmic and heuristic techniques for finding “good” plans or policies. The policy thrust has focussed on the organizational issues and processes around making decisions on and implementing transportation plans, projects, or services. This thrust includes public policy issues and approaches, market structures and regulatory processes, organization design issues, distributional consequences, environmental policy issues, and related areas.

Today, we see the need to add a third major thrust to the field of transportation — cognition and action:

• to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

• to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

• to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

to manage transportation services and enterprises better;

to use analysis more effectively to inform and influence decisions;

to use computer support more effectively in transportation organizations and enterprises.

Research in cognition and action examines how people think and act, and aims to develop aids to thinking and acting that result in significant improvements in peoples' behaviours and performance. Promising research directions draw on cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and especially empirical research on managerial cognition and problem-solving. We introduce the theory of cognitive informatics, describe some applications to transportation management, and discuss relevant software tools.