When inRiver pushes to Episerver through a connector, there is no sure way to guarantee that all information is transferred without corruption. This project aims to create a service which pulls all product information from inRiver and Episerver and does a field by field comparison and creates a checksum for the values. The result of the comparison will be saved to a database and can be displayed graphically as a tree structure on a website. The project successfully achieved all the goals defined in the specification.

One big issue for the mail order business is how to avoid and manage returns. Oneapproach being taken is that consumer insight can result in better customer satisfaction andfewer returns. The fashion industry delivers more than just a function within the clothes;fashion, excitement, and customer service for example.It is believed that a part of demand chain management, consumer insight, can help toreduce the amount of returns. This thesis approaches this issue from a company point ofview. It is investigated how mail order businesses utilizes opportunities given byeCommerce, how the companies perceives their customers, and how well they are able totailor their services to different consumer groups.Online sales channels were reviewed in order to investigate how the company is perceivedand what kinds of efforts the companies go through in order to add value to the customers.These results were combined with interviews of three companies in the mail order businessand one company selling clothes in retail stores.The complexity of the customer and the silo mentality in many companies was the firsthurdle to emerge. It was hard to get in contact with the right person. The interviewsshowed both focus on products and focus of really understanding the customer. Thisshowed both in the rigid layout of the homepages and the lack of understanding thatcustomers might have different needs when it comes to value adding services. However,the interviewed companies had varying ways of defining their customer’s needs.It is evident after this thesis that a lot of work can be done in order to better understand thecustomers, for example investigating causes to returns and how differentiated servicesmight improve how the customers perceive the service. In order to succeed in a holisticapproach, cooperation between mail order companies might be required.

Between the years 2013 and 2016, e-commerce sales grew as a percent of total retail sales in the United States from 5.8% to 8.5%, an increase of $129 billion. Some brick-and-mortar (B & M) retailers struggle with maintaining the historic levels of revenue in their stores. A multiple case study design with retail store managers was used to understand what factors engage customers to shop at B & M store locations. The consumer-dominant value creation logic was the conceptual framework. Data were collected from semistructured interviews with 5 retail store managers in Texas who demonstrated successful strategies for engaging customers in their B & M stores, and notes from observations. Data from semistructured interviews were analyzed with a traditional method to identify themes. The found themes included fun at work, customer connection, relationship, pride, and genuine care. The implications of this study for positive social change include the potential to enhance the economic vitality and development in the surrounding community by creating additional jobs and generating additional income for members of the community that could be spent in local economies.

Background: Internet and social networks have evolved to become a natural part of people‘s life and innumerous hours are spent every day interacting through these platforms. This evolution has resulted in higher expectations on fast and efficient communication with retailer‘s customers. Today‘s customers are well informed and have instant access to information about retailers and their products. Businesses have realized the potential for utilizing social media in terms of creating brand recognition, generating revenue, gaining feedback and insight from customers and improving the customer relationship. Social me-dia is no longer just an option for enterprises that wants to stay ahead in today‘s business environment, it is necessary. Purpose: The purpose of this study is to identify key concepts for how eCommerce retail-ers utilize Facebook page marketing in order to acquire and sustain customer relationships. The authors will further declare the level of ambition among the eCommerce retailers with Facebook page marketing. Method: The method used for this thesis is of qualitative and both inductive and deduc-tive character. The hermeneutic approach has been used in order to provide an understand-ing of how eCommerce retailers utilize Facebook page marketing for customer relationship building. Primary data has been collected through semi-structured interview with eCom-merce retailers in Sweden. Secondary data was obtained primary through literature and searches in Business Source Premier and Emerald Journals. Selection of respondents has been made by research about industries presence in social media. Theoretical Framework: This study is based on theories within social media marketing, relationship marketing and communication. The theoretical framework is of both funda-mental and detailed character in order to give the reader a better understanding for the top-ic and is further the foundation for our interview questions. Conclusion: Among the retailers that participated in our study, the positive aspects of Facebook page marketing have far outweighed the negative; however, we have identified dif-ferences in the level of ambitions among our respondents. When weighting the evidence we can interpret that existing routines for publications among the respondents are undeve-loped and undefined. We could further determine that our respondents are using Facebook more as a traditional one-way marketing channel with promotion of products rather than enhancing the possibilities for dialogue between the organization and their group of inter-est. Last, it prevail doubt over the value of spending money and time on Facebook page marketing, even though all of the respondents indicated will increase their budget for marketing in this medium.

Clothing purchases represent the largest selling category on the internet at $13.6 billion (US Census, 2008), however return rates are extremely high at 14-50%, almost twice as high as return rates for most other categories (Barbaro, 2007). This has negative implications for consumers and retailers as the cost of returns and lost consumers is extremely high. High return rates force retailers to take on the cost of restocking and reselling merchandise, with an estimated $100 billion lost annually (Blanchard 2005). This research focuses on online product representation with the goal of identifying the method of product representation that most effectively improves a consumers' ability to make accurate size decisions without negatively impacting brand and product quality perceptions. This research uses interviews to assess retailer beliefs about how best to deploy online clothing visualizations. Next an experiment was conducted to compare alternative clothing model visualizations to assess effects on fit satisfaction, return likelihood, brand and quality perceptions. Finally, to understand current use of visualizations by clothing retailers and their effects on consumer satisfaction and sales, a content analysis was conducted. This study can provide a solution that can improve consumers' abilities to make accurate fit decisions, thus reducing return rates and improving consumer satisfaction, at a minimal cost to retailers.

The explosive growth of the World-Wide-Web and the emergence of ecommerce are the major two factors that have led to the development of recommender systems (Resnick and Varian, 1997). The main task of recommender systems is to learn from users and recommend items (e.g. information, products or books) that match the users’ personal preferences. Recommender systems have been an active research area for more than a decade. Many different techniques and systems with distinct strengths have been developed to generate better quality recommendations. One of the main factors that affect recommenders’ recommendation quality is the amount of information resources that are available to the recommenders. The main feature of the recommender systems is their ability to make personalised recommendations for different individuals. However, for many ecommerce sites, it is difficult for them to obtain sufficient knowledge about their users. Hence, the recommendations they provided to their users are often poor and not personalised. This information insufficiency problem is commonly referred to as the cold-start problem. Most existing research on recommender systems focus on developing techniques to better utilise the available information resources to achieve better recommendation quality. However, while the amount of available data and information remains insufficient, these techniques can only provide limited improvements to the overall recommendation quality. In this thesis, a novel and intuitive approach towards improving recommendation quality and alleviating the cold-start problem is attempted. This approach is enriching the information resources. It can be easily observed that when there is sufficient information and knowledge base to support recommendation making, even the simplest recommender systems can outperform the sophisticated ones with limited information resources. Two possible strategies are suggested in this thesis to achieve the proposed information enrichment for recommenders: • The first strategy suggests that information resources can be enriched by considering other information or data facets. Specifically, a taxonomy-based recommender, Hybrid Taxonomy Recommender (HTR), is presented in this thesis. HTR exploits the relationship between users’ taxonomic preferences and item preferences from the combination of the widely available product taxonomic information and the existing user rating data, and it then utilises this taxonomic preference to item preference relation to generate high quality recommendations. • The second strategy suggests that information resources can be enriched simply by obtaining information resources from other parties. In this thesis, a distributed recommender framework, Ecommerce-oriented Distributed Recommender System (EDRS), is proposed. The proposed EDRS allows multiple recommenders from different parties (i.e. organisations or ecommerce sites) to share recommendations and information resources with each other in order to improve their recommendation quality. Based on the results obtained from the experiments conducted in this thesis, the proposed systems and techniques have achieved great improvement in both making quality recommendations and alleviating the cold-start problem.

Med hjälp av digitalisering och IT-utvecklingen har både marknadsförare och svenska konsumenter större valfrihet och möjligheter gällande försäljningskanaler och konsumtion. Med denna utveckling har det även skapats utmaningar för såväl marknadsförare som konsumenter. Å ena sidan behöver marknadsförare kunna erbjuda konsumenter försäljning via olika kanaler såsom fysiska butiker och nätbutiker, å andra sidan behöver konsumenter vara aktiva informationssökare och fatta många beslut som exempelvis pålitlighet gällande val av nätaktörer och deras erbjudanden. Enligt en undersökning, som genomförts av Kreditor, vill konsumenter överlag ha säkerhet och trygghet gällande konsumtion via internet (Dagens Handel 2007). Man kan tyda att näthandel kan innebära risker. Trots detta verkar näthandel fått fotfäste på den svenska marknaden och denna typ av konsumtion verkar bli allt vanligare bland svenska konsumenter (PostNord 2017 & Statistiska Centralbyrån 2017). Vår studie baseras bland annat på teorier inom konsumentbeteendevetenskap och olika marknadsföringsstrategier. För att få djupare kunskap om vad som gör att svenska konsumenter handlar i allt större utsträckning via nätet har vi genomfört en enkätundersökning gällande svenska konsumenternas åsikter kring näthandel, hur ofta de handlar och vilka faktorer som ligger bakom deras val av okända nätaktörer. Enkäten redovisar bland annat att positiva erfarenheter och att imitation driver svenska konsumenter till att vilja handla via internet. Faktorer som skapar förtroende och viljan att handla hos okända nätaktörer är olika betalningsalternativ, konsumentskydd, omdömen och rekommendationer från andra konsumenter och att företag använder sig av multikanalförsäljning såsom fysisk- och nätbutik. I vår undersökning fann vi att förtroende bland svenska konsumenter uppstår av konsumenterna själva och detta grundas på marknadsföringsstrategier såsom mun till mun metoden och principen om sociala bevis. Vi fann även att konsumenter verkar vara aktiva informationssökare gällande handel hos okända nätaktörer. / Based on digitalization and IT development marketers and Swedish consumers have increased the number of choices and opportunities regarding sales channels and consumption and through this development new challenges have been introduced to the actors on the market. On the one hand, marketers need to be able to offer consumers sales through various channels such as physical stores and online stores, on the other hand, consumers need to be active information seekers and make many decisions such as judging reliability in selecting online actors and their offers. According to a survey conducted by Kreditor, consumers in general are conscious when it comes to reliability and security regarding consumption via the Internet (Dagens Handel 2007). It can be argued that online shopping can pose risks. Nevertheless, online shopping seems to have been a foothold in the Swedish market and this type of consumption seems to be becoming more common among Swedish consumers (PostNord 2017 & Statistiska Centralbyrån 2017). Our study is based, among other things, on theories in consumer behavioral science and different marketing strategies. In order to get a deeper knowledge of factors behind Swedish consumers increasing online shopping we have conducted a survey of the Swedish consumers' opinions about online trading, how often they are trading together with which underlying factors that are important when buying from unknown online players. The survey states, among other things, that positive experiences and imitation drive Swedish consumers to want to shop online. Factors that create trust and willingness to trade with unknown online actors are for example different payment options, consumer privacy-policy, ratings and recommendations from other consumers but also if the companies use multi-channel sales such as both physical and online stores. In our survey we found that trustfulness for online shopping among Swedish consumers arises from marketing strategies such as word of mouth-method and the principle of social evidence. We also found that consumers seem to be active information seekers regarding trade with unknown online operators.

[pt] O objetivo desta dissertação é estudar o e-commerce como forma de comercialização, explorando as características das empresas que fazem uso desse tipo de comercialização, levando em consideração o foco logístico do fluxo de bens e serviços comercializados via lnternet. O presente trabalho pretende identificar os desafios logísticos do comércio eletrônico, abordando quais os aspectos mais importantes no comércio eletrônico segundo a visão do cliente. Objetiva, ainda, verificar os requisitos básicos para resolver o problema da logística de distribuição e entrega de bens e serviços para o consumidor final por meio de um estudo de caso aplicado ao site da empresa CasaeVideo (www.casaevideo.com.br), que é um ambiente virtual de negócios de comércio eletrônico no mercado varejista. A partir dos estudos dos problemas com relação à Logística Urbana, procurou-se mostrar a relevância da aplicação de novas recomendações de fatores críticos de sucesso, inseridos no modelo em questão, para ambientes de negócios virtuais. / [en] The objective of this dissertation is to study e-commerce as a way of marketing, exploring the characteristics of companies that use this type of marketing, taking into account the focus of logistical flow of goods and services marketed via Internet. This study aims to identify the logistical challenges of electronic commerce, addressing what is the most important in electronic commerce through the perspective of the customer. It also aims to verify the basic requirements for solving the problem of logistic distribution and delivery of goods and services to end consumers through a case study applied to the CasaeVideo s website (www.casaevideo.com.br), which is a virtual environment for ecommerce business in the retail market. From the studies of problems related to the City Logistics, sought to demonstrate the relevance of further recommendations of critical success factors, included in the model in question, for virtual business environments.

This work focuses on web personalization, its advantages for users and merchants. Presents current standards in this field, analyzes theoretical background and technical realization. Finally describes application of the theory on actual web projects - Skrz.cz and Drakkaria.cz. Main benefit of this work is a complete overview of the web personalization and general manual for personalization implementators.

This thesis deals with the Microsoft's self-service business intelligence tools and it's used for eCommerce. The main goal of this work is to analyze and design metrics and applications for effective management of eCommerce using PowerPivot and Power View. Metrics are based on balanced scorecard approach and applications are based on MBI reference model. This thesis is supposed to help eCommerce managers and administrators to implement a custom self-service business intelligence solution.