ABSTRACT An Explorative Analysis Evaluation of Electronic Retailing Customer Adoptions In the Context of Saudi Arabia To learn more about what people in Saudi Arabia thought about online shopping, a survey was distributed throughout public locations in three major cities: Riyadh, Jeddah, and Medina. The questionnaires investigated consumers’ intersecting views regarding online and in-store shopping, and attempted to learn more about the perceived usefulness and attractiveness of online shopping in Saudi Arabia, as well as privacy or trust issues related to online shopping that are relevant for Saudi customer. The main findings of this study revealed several important tendencies. For one, the study found that males favoured shopping online more than females. Moreover, respondents appeared to find online shopping to be relaxing due to reduced sales pressure. Also, proficiency in the English language seemed to be a determining factor in the consumer’s preference to shop online. In addition, people who seemed to dislike physical shopping favoured the idea of e-shopping. The findings above are exploratory in nature due to the limited sample size and sampling process. Additional study with expanded sample across a broader Saudi Arabian geographic base could be used to confirm the use initial exploratory findings.

Adopting the view that a virtual community is an influential social entity, this study provides a theoretical framework that identifies a linkage among the individual values of virtual community members, commercial orientation of virtual communities and attitudes towards the information provided by virtual communities. The present study suggests that individual values (i.e., purposive, self-discovery, social and entertainment) influence the selection of virtual communities. The community's commercial orientation (i.e., commercial or noncommercial), in turn, influences the individual attitudes towards the information provided by the communities. Credibility, relevance and empathy are the proposed attitudes that individuals may form towards the information provided in virtual communities. The proposed model provides valuable implications for marketers and business people who want to source virtual communities as viable marketing channels.

Overweight people claim to be mistreated by the fashion industry. If they were, it would be in line with branding theory supporting the idea of rejecting fat consumers to improve user imagery for fashion brands. However, fashion companies do not confess to such practices. To shed some light on the subject, I have conducted two studies. The first attempts to illustrate what effect, if any, user imagery has on fashion brands. It is an experiment designed to show how the weight of users affects consumers’ perceptions of mass market fashion brands. The findings show that consumers’ impressions of mass market fashion brands are significantly affected by the weight of its users. The effect of male user imagery is ambiguous. For women’s fashion on the other hand, slender users are to be preferred. In the second study I examine what effects these effects have on assortments. I compare the sizes of mass market clothes to the body sizes of the population. No evidence of discrimination of overweight or obese consumers was found -quite the contrary. The reasons for these unexpected findings may be explained by the requirements a brand must fulfil to make management of the customer base for user imagery purposes viable. The brand must be sensitive to user imagery; a requirement that mass market fashion fulfils. However, it must also be feasible for a company to exclude customers, and while garment sizes can be restricted to achieve this, the high volume sales strategy of mass market fashion apparently cannot.

Shoplifting proliferated in eighteenth-century England with retail expansion, acquiring a new prominence as it was made a capital crime. This study comprehensively examines this phenomenon, seating it within the historiographies of crime, marketing and consumption. The majority of offenders were occasional thieves, drawn from some of the most economically vulnerable sectors of plebeian communities, their profile confirming the significance of age and gender. While specialist shops were shoplifters' primary target, particularly those selling textiles and clothing, a spatial analysis suggests that thieves preferred smaller, local shops to their more prestigious counterparts. Shoplifters matched their tactics to the size and status of shop, using performance as a tool to achieve their ends. Yet the study questions assumptions around the influence of fashion and consumer desire on shop theft, discussing how the type and quantity of goods stolen points to more complex economic motives, both financial and social. The potential impact of the crime on women's role as shopkeepers and the tendency to sexualise female offenders are also scrutinised. While retailers were initially instrumental in driving legislative change and worked constructively with magistrates to control the crime's incidence, their constant reluctance to prosecute conveys a false impression of the crime's true extent. The study calculates prevalence, and projects the financial impact of shoplifting on its victims at a time of highly competitive retailing. 'Risk-based' in their thinking, retailers developed practical means of protecting their stores, while new marketing techniques proved variously a boon and handicap. Yet shopkeepers' reactions were not uniform, some apparently preferring such situational prevention, while others turned more readily to the law. This ambivalence was also exhibited in their engagement with the capital law reform that ultimately saw the repeal of the Shoplifting Act. Employing a variety of sources from court transcripts to literature, the study finally explores how changing social perspectives on crime during the period coloured public attitudes to shoplifting, foreshadowing reconfigured nineteenth-century perceptions of the crime.

This diploma thesis is dealing with the Czech retail market and an influence of foreign direct investment on it. The thesis is divided into five parts. First two chapters are focused on the theoretical definition of the foreign direct investment, trade as well and the tendencies in the international business in the 21st century. Third and fourth chapters are dealing with the inflow of the foreign direct investment into Czech Republic or with the status of the trade in the Czech economy. Fifth part is devoted to the Czech retail market -- its performance and evolution since 1989. In this chapter is also exercised comparison of the foreign and domestic enterprises in their productivity and performance.

Relationsmarknadsföring har idag blivit en central del i många företags marknadsföring. Kort sammanfattat är relationsmarknadsföring ett marknadsföringssätt som fokuserar på att etablera och utveckla relationen till kunden. Eftersom en konsument idag, bland annat med hjälp av Internet, har tillgång till väldigt mycket information ökar medvetenheten och ger kunden en större möjlighet att välja var och av vem hon ska handla. De konventionella marknadsföringsmetoderna blir alltmer ineffektiva och företagen lägger istället mer energi på att skapa en relation till kunden som individ. Inom modebranschens detaljhandel syns detta tillvägagångssätt i form av kundklubbar, nyhetsutskick och den personliga interaktionen i butikerna. Samtidigt som mer kraft läggs på relationsbyggande åtgärder märks det ändå i underskningar att en stor andel är missnöjda med kundklubbar, nyhetsutskick och det personliga bemötandet, vilket leder fram till rapportens syfte: att undersöka konsumenternas uppfattning i detta.För att genomföra denna undersökning utformades en kvantitativ, standardiserad enkät som distribuerades via internet till män och kvinnor i åldern 18-30 år som var boende inom Borås med omnejd. Primärdata som undersökningen genererade jämfördes sedan med sekundärdata från studielitteratur, vetenskapliga artiklar, artiklar från olika tidskrifter, samt i viss mån uppsatser på minst C-nivå. Detta ledde fram till resultat som visade på att en majoritet av de svarande är kundklubbsmedlemmar samt får nyhetsutskick i någon form, att de främst är ute efter rabatter och snabba nyheter, men att de i viss mån är missnöjda med hur de får information från butikerna.Relationship marketing is today a vital part of most companies marketing. Shortly summarized, the relationship marketing is a way of marketing which focuses on establishing and developing relationships with the customers. As the consumers today, much thanks to the Internet, have access to a lot of information, it raises awareness and gives the customer a greater choice of where and by whom she should buy. Conventional marketing methods are increasingly ineffective and companies spend more energy to create a relationship with the customer as an individual. Within the fashion industry's retailing business, this approach is shown in the terms of customer clubs, newsletters and personal interaction in the stores. While more and more companies spends time and money in relationship-building measures, surveys are yet saying that a big part of the customers are dissatisfied with the customer clubs, newsletters, and the personal treatment, which leads us to the main purpose of this report: to investigate consumer attitudes in this matters.To conduct this study we designed a quantitative, standardized questionnaire that was distributed via the Internet to men and women aged 18-30 years who were living in Borås and the surrounding areas. Primary data that were generated by the survey were then compared with secondary data from the studyliterature, scientific papers, articles from various magazines, and to some essays of at least C-level. This led to results that showed that a majority of respondents are customer club members and receive newsletters in some kind of form, that they are primarily looking for discounts and fast news, but that they are dissatisfied with how they obtain information from stores. / Program: Butikschef, textil och mode

The objective of this thesis is to propose an optimal mix of shops at Ruzyně airport and ways of improving the comunication strategy towards customers of the airport's shops. The theoretical part outlines the comunication theories and specifications of Travel retailing at the airports. The practical part contains a situational analysis of the comunication at Ruzyně airport including analysis of the airport's shops. This is followed by inquiries using questionnaires passed on to a selected target group, by an external analysis of other world's airports and by a sumarizing SWOT analysis. Based on this research, recomendations to Letiště Ruzyně on how to structure the mix of airpoirt's shops and on how to make the comunication with the airport's customers are suggested.

E-commerce is increasingly recognised as an integrated, rather than independent, part of the retail industry. As online competition grows and online marketing activities intensify, the importance of customer loyalty in e-retailing has also taken central stage in marketing research. This study explores the nature and characteristics of e-loyalty and its direct and indirect antecedents. Drawing from the literature on customer loyalty in the traditional, offline business context, it contends that e-loyalty is determined primarily by the quality of the relationship between an Internet retailer and its customers, and the customers' overall satisfaction with the retailer. Relationship quality, in turn, is influenced by the levels of perceived safety, trust and commitment that customers have in relation to their retailer, while service quality, Web site quality and value perception contribute to overall customer satisfaction in this context. Thus, relationship quality and overall satisfaction mediate the relationship between e-loyalty and its indirect predictors. To test these relationships, over 500 customers of four Australian Internet retailers were surveyed online. The questionnaire contains 92 indicators that have been either employed in prior research, or newly developed based on existing theory. These indicators were first factor analysed to determine the underlying dimensions of the research constructs. The relationships between these constructs were subsequently tested using structural equation modelling (SEM). In general, most hypothesised relationships were well supported, suggesting a consistency in the relationships between these constructs across online and offline settings. To this extent, the results indicate that existing offline marketing theories can provide a platform to create a body of knowledge pertinent to Web-based marketing. The results of the analysis, however, also show that not all hypothesised relationships could be upheld. Also, the findings indicate that the dimensionality of some constructs differs, to varying degrees, from what is reported in prior studies. These suggest that online consumer perception and behaviour are likely to differ, in some way, from those in the offline context, signalling a need for more context-specific research into this domain. On the whole, the study confirms the existence and benefits of customer loyalty in online retailing. In addition, it identifies four underlying dimensions of e-loyalty. Dimension 1 comprises behaviours commonly cited as the most prominent and beneficial indicators of customer loyalty (such as repurchase behaviour and word-of-mouth communication). Dimension 2 reflects the level of attachment that loyal customers feel towards their retailers. Dimension 3 indicates customer willingness to adjust their consumption patterns in favour of the retailer's range of offerings. The last dimension is related to customer willingness to move beyond a pure buyer-seller relationship, and to engage in partner-like behaviours (e.g., tolerating mistakes and providing feedback). With regard to relationships between the research constructs, the SEM results confirm that service quality, web site quality, and value perception are major predictors of overall satisfaction, while trust and commitment, but not safety perception, are antecedents of relationship quality. E-loyalty is not found to be significantly affected by overall satisfaction, whereas relationship quality only has a slightly noticeable impact on this construct. The findings thus fail to support the notion that customer satisfaction and relationship quality are two major antecedents of e-loyalty. The results also do not support the speculation that satisfaction and relationship quality are the main mediators of the relationship between e-loyalty and its primary antecedents. On the contrary, e-loyalty is found to be influenced directly by customer commitment, value perception and service quality, and indirectly by Web site quality, safety perception and trust. With online shopping growing in popularity, insights into the dimensionality of e-loyalty, as well as the factors that engender e-loyalty, can provide a useful framework on which appropriate marketing strategies could be developed to enhance the loyalty of online shoppers. To this extent, findings from this research are meaningful not only for marketing academics but, also, for Internet retailers.

<p>Structural changes on the grocery market usually take place when the consumer is persuaded to take on the more labourintense parts of the distributionprocess. Internettrade changes this by causing competition between the unpaid work done by consumers and the labor performed by employees. In this master thesis grocery shopping on the internet is analyzed in a economic perspective with focus on distribution, changing marketstructures, driving forces and the future potential of internet as a saleschannel. The main conclusions are that consumerdemand and the belief in electronic commerceas a costreducing mechanism as well as a powerful new marketing tool were the driving forces behind the fast growth of grocery shopping on the internet. Electronic commerce introduces a new model of distribution with changing roles for consumers and grocerychains. In the thesis different scenarios concerning the future of grocery shopping on the Internet are presented, where an increase in the demand for internetservices is an important factor for success.</p>

Distribution channel activities account for a large share of economic activity, and innovation in distribution is recurrently shown to hold great potential for efficiency-improvement and restructuring. In recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in innovations and their role in economic change. A growing body of work uses an evolutionary economic approach to these questions. Empirically, this research has primarily been directed towards innovation in product design or production processes, while innovation in distribution channels has remained a relatively unexplored area of study within evolutionary economics.This study was inspired by the possibility to use the emerging evolutionary economic theory to improve our understanding of innovation in distribution channels. The evolutionary framework is combined with theory on distribution channels, and the adapted framework applied to two cases of innovation in Swedish grocery trade. These two innovations, the introduction of the self-service format and the development of a vertically and horizontally coordinated, channel organisation, the so-called all-channel, have both been important in shaping distribution channel structures.In addition to providing some new insights into these historical developments, the study makes a contribution to the theory of distribution channels with regard to innovations. The role of the environment in shaping the characteristics of the innovation is an addition to conventional views of innovation in channel theory. The interdependent nature of actors and processes in distribution channel is acknowledged, and the possibilities for modularising the system is advanced as an important strategic tool in facilitating the adoptability of distribution innovations. However, the success or failure of an innovation is found to depend on the adopting actors’ ability to mobilise system-wide effects. / Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 1998