This thesis analyses the current situation of the retail market in the Czech Republic. It examines the principal trends in the distribution politics which have an important influence on the czech retail market. In the following section there is described how the most successful retail chains have developed in recent years. At the end, by three case studies I allow the reader to have an overview of the current practice. I explain how the distribution centers work and what is the business strategy of one of the leading chains in the Czech Republic.

Electronic commerce sales continue rising due to Internet growth. However, online retailers may not be doing enough to promote their products causing them to forego potential profits. Stimulating impulse purchase behavior, online retailing environments have the capability to increase profits. Research has not conclusively identified how Web site aesthetics impact perceived ease of use (PE) and perceived usefulness (PU) as antecedents of intention to purchase in impulse purchase behavior. Understanding this impact of Web site aesthetics will enable online retailers to design Web sites that engage users, leading to additional purchases. Using the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), a framework frequently referenced and studied within information systems research, this study adapted the TAM to identify a model conceptualizing the effects of Web site color (CA), images (IA), and typography (TA) aesthetics on PE and PU for individuals among those exhibiting a higher than average impulse buying tendency (IBT). The TAM posits PE and PU contribute to an individual's behavioral intention. Research has shown Web site aesthetics have the ability to influence PE and PU. This descriptive study developed and executed a Web-based experiment using a fictitious purchase scenario and post-experiment survey with a 32-item instrument measuring: CA, IA, TA, PE, PU, and IBT. A total of 301 responses were gathered. Data analysis using various statistical tests and simple path analysis was performed to propose a modified TAM. Consumer demographics, age and gender, were also considered. The results demonstrated CA, IA, and TA correlated significantly with PE and PU. TA was found to be the largest contributor to PE and PU, followed by IA. CA was not found to contribute to PE or PU. Age was found to significantly affect PU only for 25-34 year olds, indicating the age group may be influenced easier by Web site aesthetics than other age groups. No significant differences were found in PU and gender, PE and age groups, or PE and gender despite prior literature concluding relationships existed. Research implications include recommendations for Web site design and the identification of an adapted TAM displaying the influence of Web site aesthetics on PE and PU.

Digitalization has impacted online retailing heavily, however traditional stores have not changed as much in comparison. Earlier studies have not only suggested how stores could reinvent themselves, but also indicated that brands could have great advantages by doing so. Furthermore, the customer experience and it’s reinforced importance within brick and mortar has been highlighted. It has also been established that the customer experience could be strengthen by implementing advanced technology. Due to the lack of research within the subject and a mainly theoretical discussion about how and why stores implement advanced technology in store, this study aims to investigate from more practical point of view how and why companies implement advanced technology. This study has a qualitative method, by conducting a total of 7 interviews. Five interviews were conducted with employees within different retailing companies implementing advanced technology in store; BMW, Clas Ohlson, Volvo Car Company, Volkswagen and Synsam Group. To continue, two complementary interviews from a rather general market perspective were conducted; one with AMF Fastigheter on their new project The Lobby focusing on the development of the future store and one with Curiat (NZ) Limited a subject specialist on Augmented Reality, which was one of the most common technologies in this study. The study identifies several factors correlating to how and why brands reinvent their physical stores through advanced technologies. In order to implement the technology successfully, such as Virtual Reality, Augmented reality and Interactive Digital Signage, traditional retailers have to modify their business models and their operational skills within the organization. One main motivation as for why traditional retailers implement advanced technology is a changed consumer behavior and market. This puts a new kind of pressure on traditional retailers and stresses the importance of the customer experience. The customer experience and relationships can be strengthened by implementing advanced technology and are two important factors as to why retailers utilize advanced technology in store. Traditional retailers also use the implemented advanced technology as a marketing tool, in order to market themselves as innovative and meet the new market. In addition to this, there has been a change in communication between customer and store. Retailers can use the advanced technology in order to not only interact in a new way with their customers, but also communicate through various of their channels. This creates a smoother and more seamless experience for the customer, and connect offline with online.

Background - Luxury companies have long been reluctant to adopt the internet as a mode of distribution. A luxury brand’s concept of exclusiveness is seemingly incompatible with the ubiquitous nature of the internet. Hence, many luxury brands are fearful that distributing their products on third-party online retail platforms might decrease the brands’ vital aura of luxury. Purpose - The purpose of this study is to explore consumer perceptions, attitudes and purchase intention towards a luxury brand being distributed on an online multibrand marketplace. This research aims to fill the existing gap on the ambiguous nature of luxury branding and distribution in an online multibrand context. Methodology - A qualitative approach including ten semi-structured interviews with Swedish millennials were conducted. A case study of a hypothetical brand alliance between Louis Vuitton and Amazon was developed, presented and discussed. Collected data was analyzed through thematic analysis. Findings - Results show that the online distribution of a luxury brand did influence consumer perceptions of the luxury brand when seen online. However, it did not result in a change in their overall attitude or purchase intention towards the luxury brand. Additionally, it was found that consumers were not willing to buy luxury on an multibrand marketplace platform.

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.

Purpose - The purpose of this study is to extend the understanding of the business model of video game retailers using online and physical stores focusing on the impact of digital platforms on the retailing industry within the context of video game industry considering different actor’s perspectives like retailers and consumers. Design/methodology/approach - This is a multiple-case study based on deductive reasoning. In this qualitative study, two cases of click-and-mortar retailers operating in the Swedish video game industry have been considered along with feedback from customers. Online personal interviews and semi-structured interviews have been conducted with retailers and customers respectively. Both primary and secondary data have been used to conduct the study. Findings - Findings show that video game retailers need to encourage engagement through incentives and other activities in order to create value and change up their formats and sales strategies through pricing to reach new customers and focus on design of their online store fronts to convey trustworthiness.  Research limitations - A major limitation has been the COVID-19 pandemic spreading during the writing of this paper, which resulted in companies backing out to refocus their efforts. Another limitation has been the legal aspect as companies owned by bigger publishers denied to take part in the study to avoid revealing sensitive information. Practical implications - It offers some insightful practical suggestions to retailers who are struggling hard to adopt digital transformations in the industry. Originality - Authors’ proposed research model, based on Sorescu et al. (2011)’s retail business model and the empirical findings, contribute in the less explored domain of research on business models from retailer’s perspectives. Moreover, it adds values in industry specific study like the video game industry in Sweden considering all actors, which is argued as scarce.

Background: The retail sector is rapidly developing over the past years. Retailers are investing more efforts and resources to provide a seamless experience through multiple channels. These developments led to significant changes in customer behaviour. Customers buying activities and way of selecting the products and retailers faced different changes and developments. The online retailing sector is entitled to continuous development. The latest development was due to the Covid-19 global pandemic that came without any previous notice. The customer behaviour starts adopting the digital online channels in most of their needs and wants. The appearance of new customer behaviour patterns due to Covid-19 lead to the emergence of new customer behaviour.Purpose: This study is of an exploratory and constructive nature. It is concerned with deepening the knowledge about the change in customer buying behaviour brought by Covid-19 on the retailing sector. The aim of the study is to identify and test new behavioural patterns that would influence the Swedish millennials’ in selecting between online and offline stores for shopping and buying fashion products.Method: An abductive approach was followed in this paper. Mixed methods of both qualitative and quantitative were used to fulfil the purpose of this exploratory research. The research followed a sequential exploratory design of two data collection phases. Theiiempirical data was conducted from (4) focus groups sessions with a total number of (20) interviewee, and (94) relevant responses from a web-based survey.Conclusion: The study has revealed two significant findings and contributed to propose a conceptual model. The fruitful results of this study are: (1) there is a vast customers’ migration towards online stores. (2) there are new behavioural patterns related to Covid-19 that are influencing the customer buying behaviour. (3) A proposed conceptual model which is concerned with the factors influencing the customer buying behaviour in selecting between online and offline fashion stores.

Researchers in consumer complaint behaviour agree that consumers’ complaint intentions are influenced by online service failures. These online service failures include delivery problems, payment security problems, web-page navigational problems, product information problems, and customer service problems. Online service failures cause customer dissatisfaction that could trigger consumer complaint behaviour. Most consumer complaint behaviour researchers concur that the purchasing environment primarily influences consumers’ complaint behavioural intentions. Relevant literature on Millennial consumers and theory on service failures and consumer complaint behaviour was integrated to provide this study's theoretical grounding. This study aimed to determine the Millennial consumers' complaint behavioural intentions following a service failure in the online clothing retail context. This study also determined differences in Emerging, Young and Older Millennials complaint behavioural intentions. A survey research design was implemented, using a structured, self-administered online questionnaire to measure Millennial consumers’ (n = 193) complaint behavioural intentions following a service failure in the online clothing retail context. The self-administered questionnaire made use of existing scales and self-developed questions. Millennial consumers indicated that delivery problems would cause them the most dissatisfaction, followed by payment security problems, customer service problems, product information problems, and webpage navigational problems. The exploratory factor analysis revealed four complaint intention factors. The four factors were labelled as electronic communication, switching behaviour, complaints to the retailer, and negative word-of-mouth. Negative word-of-mouth as private complaint action was the most relatively pertinent complaint intention, followed by switching intention and complaining to the retailer. Electronic WOM was the least pertinent complaint intention. More specifically, an ANOVA test was performed to determine the differences in emerging, young and older Millennials’ complaint behavioural intentions following a service failure in the online clothing retail context. The descriptive results indicated that the majority of the Millennial cohort would instead take action than no action. ANOVA’s were performed to determine the differences across Emerging, Young and Older Millennials’ complaint intentions following a service failure in the online clothing retail context. The ANOVA’s indicated that the three complaint intentions of electronic communication, switching, and complaining to retailers did not vary across the Millennials cohorts. This implies that the respective Millennial groups equally intended to take these individual complaint actions. Also, only word-of-mouth intention differed significantly across the Millennial groups. Older Millennials were less likely to contact family and/or friends in person or by text messaging on WhatsApp than Emerging and Young Millennials. The study makes a valuable contribution towards the consumer complaint behaviour literature and for consideration by online retailers, multi or omni-channel retailers, and marketers of clothing products. / Dissertation (MConsumer Science)--University of Pretoria, 2021. / Consumer Science / MConsumer Science (Clothing Management) / Unrestricted

This study examines the online atmospheric cues of colour and music and their impact upon feeling and purchase intention of consumers in the online environment. The research design was experimental and used data from a questionnaire. A pilot test of the instrument was conducted. The final questionnaire contained 39 items and a demographic section. A total of 200 questionnaires were collected. Participants were exposed to a specific set of online atmospheric elements. Results indicated a difference in regard to purchase intention when exposed to different colour. Results also found a correlation between feeling and internet purchase intention. Managerial and theoretical implications are discussed along with future research suggestions.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to determine if various measures of loyalty (satisfaction, continued patronage and share of wallet) converge or diverge. A related objective of the study is to examine the relative efficacies of merchandise quality, interaction quality, price and store environment in inducing store loyalty for two customer segments of a national automotive parts and accessories retailer in the USA. The two segments are the doityourself customers and the professional customers. Design/methodology/approach – Data for the study are collected via mail questionnaires. Usable responses are obtained from 17,034 customers. In operationalizing store loyalty, affective, conative and actionrelated measures are used. Findings – The results altogether suggest that merchandise quality is an effective predictor of loyalty but perhaps not as critical or dominant as interaction quality. Results also show that similar factors consistently exert like influence in generating loyalty for the two customer segments. Research limitations/implications – The efficacies of other antecedent variables (e.g. perceived value/value for money) as drivers of store loyalty should be examined. Also, it would be worthwhile to investigate the possible moderating role of demographic characteristics (e.g. gender) and situational characteristics (e.g. critical incident recovery) in attenuating the relationships between the antecedent variables and store loyalty. Practical implications – To reinforce loyalty among its both doityourself and professional customers, the focal retailer should continue to enhance the interaction skills of current and prospective employees via careful selection, training and motivation. Originality/value – The paper shows that the three measures of loyalty (satisfaction, continued patronage and share of wallet) converge. The strongest correlations are between affective and conative loyalty.