The Chinese E-commerce market is the largest in the world and E-commerce takes up more of the retail market in China than in western countries. Why are Chinese consumers such big spenders online? This thesis examines the differences in consumer shopping behavior in China and Sweden in the aims to find some of the factors explaining the reasons. Based on a review of previous research on consumer behavior a theoretical framework was created which was the foundation for a survey. Survey responses were collected through two surveys, with the same questions, conducted in the native language of Sweden and China. While the generalizability of the survey have some limitations in regards to sampling, this thesis provide some key findings: Chinese consumers are more social shoppers, influenced by social media, family and friends. The social experience of shopping online enhance Chinese consumers experience and is a factor in increasing their expenditures online.  Chinese consumers shop more on international stores and shop more through their cell phones than Swedes.  Chinese consumers are also choosing online shopping out of convenience and usefulness.

Purpose: The study aims to increase knowledge of dealers' purchasing behavior of impulse goods in wholesale trade. Methodology: An exploratory survey method has been selected in order to investigate the relatively unexplored topic; buyer behavior of impulse goods in the wholesale. Data has been collected through interview of 27 dealers that conduct business with bulk confectionery sales across Sweden. A semi-structured interview technique has been selected, with a predetermined interview schedule but with space for follow-up questions and discussion. Conclusion: The background to this work argued that there is not much research on how retailers reasons when buying convenience products, or also called as impulse items. It is usually the sale of goods such as several of the informants believe is critical to their business existence. Impulse goods which do not require any effort, has little search time and usually are cheap and suits many customers pockets. It was therefore of interest to investigate whether the retailer is acting as their customers when they buy in bulk confectionery, which separated this study and considered to be an impulse to be, by definition, from wholesalers like Axfood Närlivs. What are the factors they take into consideration when choosing a product? How do they reflect on price, quality, delivery, access and communication with the wholesaler?

Master of Science / Department of Food, Nutrition, Dietetics and Health / Delores Chambers / With increasing global e-commerce scenario, online shopping has become a part of our day-to-day life for products ranging from food to clothing and electronics. With globalization on one hand and tremendous change in the lifestyle of people, on the other hand, eating food outside of the home has also become an inevitable part of life nowadays. This study was designed to understand how photographs and information of the products influence the purchase behavior of consumers, to increase the purchase intent and liking of clothing sold online and food in a restaurant. The objectives of this study were to determine which type of photograph/description would have higher liking and purchase intent by consumers when they are shopping for clothes online and when ordering food in a restaurant. It also aimed to use different types of product descriptions to find any differences in overall liking, product perception, and purchase intent. An online survey was conducted with Indian women (n=600) through Qualtrics software. Data about demographics, overall liking, purchase intent and level of information gained based on the photographs were inquired for different type of photographic presentation of saris and Indian curries in two different sections. ANOVA, Correspondence Analysis (CA), frequency count analysis and descriptive statistics were employed for data analysis using XLSTAT software. In case of online shopping for clothing, especially saris, the results revealed that adding photographs of a model with/without a description to be a better presentation method as it acts as a virtual representation of the seller and is believed to establish trust between the consumers and the sellers. This thereby would lead to significantly higher overall liking, level of being informed and purchase intent. Similarly, in the case of restaurant shopping for food where the effect of photographs on a restaurant menu was studied, adding photographs of the food along with the sides with/without description was found to be a better presentation method. This was in turn related to significantly higher overall liking, level of being informed and purchase intent. Though there are no differences in the type of description added to the picture, adding information about the product was still found to be a critical factor for higher liking and purchase intent in both cases.

In-store communication is part of marketing communication. Importance of in-store communication is on the rise, since mass-media communication is loosing its efficiency. In-store promotion works with variety of instrumens, how to influence customers right in the place of sale. How these instruments work and influence customers is the main focus of this thesis.

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Problem: Even though many types of research were conducted on generic brands, literature about Swedish and Lithuanian students on this perspective is almost nonexistent. Research questions: Which essential factors that shape the intention to purchase or not to purchase generic store brands differ between Lithuanian and Swedish students? What are the differences in the shopping behavior and perceptions of Swedish and Lithuanian students as consumers of generic brands? Does the packaging design highlight any differences between Lithuanian and Swedish students as consumers of generic brands? Methodology: We conducted an anonymous quantitative study. Lithuanian and Swedish students were the only respondents who were applicable for this research. All other respondents were filtered out. Conclusions: Lithuanians and Swedish students are somewhat similar in their intention to purchase generics. We noticed minor differences in their preferences for packaging. Furthermore, students differ in some aspects of shopping behavior and generic products preferences.

Predicting customers’ intention to purchase products online is an important issue. This thesis aims to understand how online shopping decision is determined by individual’s intention to buy via Internet and his/her attitude toward e-purchase. This study by integrating the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) with the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), attempts to understand how website usefulness and ease of use, as well as customers’ attitude toward online shopping, influence purchase intention influence the online purchase. Those two models adopted in an online environment were used to analyze the outcome of the survey among Polish e-shoppers. By adopting the idea of regular and heavy Internet users, this study tries to differentiate the online shopping behavior in those two groups. The findings of the thesis have been found to be partially consistent with both models. However the difference between heavy and regular Internet users in frequency of buying online has not been confirmed.

Internet has over the years developed to a platform where more and more companies and organizations control their businesses. Men are spending considerably more time shopping in general compared to only a decade ago, and the numbers are still increasing. Men are using the internet to buy products more often than women do worldwide. Stereotypes tell us that women like shopping for clothes while men do not. Men in Sweden buy more than women in 14 out of 16 purchasing categories on the inter-net; one of the other two is fairly even. The last category is “clothes and accessories” and even though Sweden is proved to be the least masculine country in a study containing 53 countries in total and are proved to be so called quick-shoppers, men do not shop clothes and accessories to the same extent as women in Sweden. Thus the question we wanted to investigate further was what is important to priori-tize in terms of website design and structure when selling clothes and accessories in Sweden.The purpose of this report derived from the problematization follows: to bring out which factors of a websites’ design and structure that are most important and most correlated with the intention to pur-chase on a website selling clothes and accessories targeting men in Sweden.In order to get an answer to our questions we used a deductive approach where previous studies within the area was carefully looked through and the most important factors for intentions to purchase and usability in other studies were used to see how they were related to the intentions to purchase and which factors that were more important than others. A quantitative approach was applied and a survey was constructed to send out to people in the ages 16-34.The results were unsatisfying in terms of correlations with the intentions to purchase, however indica-tion of importance in the categories “Ease of use”, “Trustworthiness and convenience” and “Presenta-tion of supply” were derived from the analysis.

RFID technologies are being recently adopted in the retail space tracking consumer in-store movements. The RFID-collected data are location sensitive and constantly updated as a consumer moves inside a store. By capturing the entire shopping process including the movement path rather than analyzing merely the shopping basket at check-out, the RFID-collected data provide unique and exciting opportunities to study consumer purchase behavior and thus lead to actionable marketing applications.This dissertation research focuses on (a) advancing the representation and management of the RFID-collected shopping path data; (b) analyzing, modeling and predicting customer shopping activities with a spatial pattern discovery approach and a dynamic probabilistic modeling based methodology to enable advanced spatial business intelligence. The spatial pattern discovery approach identifies similar consumers based on a similarity metric between consumer shopping paths. The direct applications of this approach include a novel consumer segmentation methodology and an in-store real-time product recommendation algorithm. A hierarchical decision-theoretic model based on dynamic Bayesian networks (DBN) is developed to model consumer in-store shopping activities. This model can be used to predict a shopper's purchase goal in real time, infer her shopping actions, and estimate the exact product she is viewing at a time. We develop an approximate inference algorithm based on particle filters and a learning procedure based on the Expectation-Maximization (EM) algorithm to perform filtering and prediction for the network model. The developed models are tested on a real RFID-collected shopping trip dataset with promising results in terms of prediction accuracies of consumer purchase interests.This dissertation contributes to the marketing and information systems literature in several areas. First, it provides empirical insights about the correlation between spatial movement patterns and consumer purchase interests. Such correlation is demonstrated with in-store shopping data, but can be generalized to other marketing contexts such as store visit decisions by consumers and location and category management decisions by a retailer. Second, our study shows the possibility of utilizing consumer in-store movement to predict consumer purchase. The predictive models we developed have the potential to become the base of an intelligent shopping environment where store managers customize marketing efforts to provide location-aware recommendations to consumers as they travel through the store.