مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد آینده خرده فروشی omnichannel – الزویر 2018

The retail industry, an important element of the global economy, has had US$ 22.6 trillion revenues in 2015 and accounts for 31% of the global gross domestic product (Research and Markets, 2016). The top 250 global retailers alone generated almost $4.5 trillion in revenue in 2014 (Kalish et al., 2016)—more than the GDP of most countries. The retail industry is also in constant flux, undergoing significant transformations that require retailers to adapt continually if they want to survive in the market. Hence, efforts to understand the retail industry and its transformations warrant the attention of both researchers and practitioners. Over the last two decades, the transformation of the retail industry was largely driven by the internet and emergence of new online channels (Verhoef et al., 2015). The internet led to the emergence of purely online retailers like Amazon and eBay and transformed traditionally storefront-based (i.e., bricks-and-mortar) into multi-channel retailers (Min and Wolfinbarger, 2005; Pentina et al., 2009; Zhang et al., 2010). Online channels also brought changes to consumers’ purchasing behaviors and loyalty (Zhang et al., 2010) as consumers started to browse products in stores and then purchase them online elsewhere, intensifying competition in the industry (Balakrishnan et al., 2014) and forcing many retailers to add online channels to their mix (Bernstein et al., 2008). By 2008, > 80% of US retailers were serving more than one channel (Kilcourse and Rowen, 2008), and driven by continual advances in digital technologies, the number of new channels keeps growing (Rigby, 2011). As a result, while a simplistic distinction between online and offline channels was sufficient in the early 2000s, today a more nuanced view of online channels must distinguish among web stores, mobile apps, and social media (Verhoef et al., 2015). While the emergence of new channels has transformed the retail industry over the last decades, over the next decade the retail industry’s ongoing transformation will be driven by the integration of these and other channels into a single, seamless customer experience: omnichannel retail. Consumers already interact with a single retailer via multiple channels (Sorescu et al., 2011) and increasingly expect these channels to “talk to” one another, to be integrated in a seamless shopping experience (Hansen and Sia, 2015) that allows them, for example, to use different channels for product search, purchase, and aftersales service (Neslin et al., 2006). Integration of these channels into a seamless experience is likely to increase customers’ purchase intentions (Herhausen et al., 2015), but retailers continue to operate separate channels separately (Neslin et al., 2006; Piotrowicz and Cuthbertson, 2014). This traditional approach imposes transformational challenges for retailers who want to integrate previously disintegrated channels and implement services that bridge multiple channels (Verhoef et al., 2015). Omnichannel retail is largely driven by technological advances like the increasing pervasiveness of mobile computing and the rise of augmented reality technologies, which enable retailers to blur the boundaries between channels (Brynjolfsson et al., 2013). However, they also lead to an exponentially increasing number of touchpoints between retailers and their customers that must be managed (Verhoef et al., 2015). As a result of changing customer expectations and an increasing number of channels that require integration, many retailers struggle in their efforts to move from multi-channel to omnichannel retail (Business Insider, 2017; Forrester Consulting, 2014; Williams and Cameron, 2015; Wurmser, 2014).