Review of studies on digital transaction platforms in marketing journals

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Digital transaction platforms now intermediate a large number of transactions between end-customers and independent sellers and service providers in many parts of the economy. In retail, for example, Amazon.com now intermediates transactions between end-customers and hundreds of thousands of independent sellers worldwide, while Etsy.com connects artists, crafters, and collectors with buyers of a large range of niche and rare products. The growing popularity of digital transaction platforms, therefore, has significant implications for retail, marketing and distribution scholars as the existing interaction patterns in the value-chain are increasingly replaced by new digital intermediaries. The purpose of this review is, therefore, to examine, through an extensive and rigorous review of research on digital transaction platforms in marketing journals, what we know and what opportunities lie ahead to expand the theoretical and empirical understanding of digital transaction platforms. The review shows that despite increasing multi-disciplinary and managerial interest towards digital transaction platforms and the platform economy, they remain largely unexplored in marketing journals, and the existing research and theorizing attempts remain fragmented. Therefore, there are many opportunities for marketing, retail and distribution scholars to, for example, collaborate with industry and practitioners in order to gain new perspectives and access to novel data sources, and for example, meet the emerging funding requirements of many universities and governmental funding agencies for more rigorous multi-disciplinary research on digital markets and digital business models

Influential Article Review - Product Returns and Package Handling Procedure

This paper examines consumer behavior. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: High product return rates are an increasingly pressing challenge for many e-retailers around the world. To address this problem, this paper offers a new perspective by focusing on the critical moment of the package-opening process. Going beyond previous research, which has primarily focused on website information and the product itself, we examine the effects of the outside appearance (i.e., the color of the delivery package) and contents of the delivery package (i.e., extra gifts, coupons, and preprinted return labels) on consumer return behavior. Our findings across two experimental studies and an observational field study show that a well-considered package design, including colorful packaging and extra gifts, significantly lowers consumers’ return intentions and actual returns. We also explore the process of consumers’ cognitive–affective reactions after opening a delivery package. During this two-stage reaction process, pleasure plays a crucial role in the consumer’s return choice. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German

Why are some websites researched more than others? A review of research into the global top twenty

The web is central to the work and social lives of a substantial fraction of the world’s population, but the role of popular websites may not always be subject to academic scrutiny. This is a concern if social scientists are unable to understand an aspect of users’ daily lives because one or more major websites have been ignored. To test whether popular websites may be ignored in academia, this article assesses the volume and citation impact of research mentioning any of twenty major websites. The results are consistent with the user geographic base affecting research interest and citation impact. In addition, site affordances that are useful for research also influence academic interest. Because of the latter factor, however, it is not possible to estimate the extent of academic knowledge about a site from the number of publications that mention it. Nevertheless, the virtual absence of international research about some globally important Chinese and Russian websites is a serious limitation for those seeking to understand reasons for their web success, the markets they serve or the users that spend time on them. The sites investigated were Google, YouTube, Facebook, Baidu, Wikipedia, QQ, Tmall, Taobao, Yahoo, Amazon, Twitter, Sohu, Live, VK, JD, Instagram, Sina, Weibo, Yandex, and 360

Managing physical inventory and return policies for omnichannel retailing

As the retail industry increasingly adopts an omnichannel strategy amidst the growth of e-commerce, this study explores the interplay between inventory and return policies in such a setting. Specifically, we focus on “return losses,” defined as the losses incurred by retailers due to customer product returns. We target how these return losses impact retailers’ profits and physical inventories. While previous research has mainly concentrated on cross-channel returns, little attention has been paid to how omnichannel return policies affect store inventory and profit. We posit that profit-maximizing retailers allow consumers to select their purchase channels based on utility but require returns to follow specific policies. In this paper, we model four return policies based on the channel of return: original purchasing channel return, offline return, online return, and cross-channel return. We use a newsvendor model to construct an optimal profit function that accounts for the additional profit from offline return, uncertainty demand, and inventory cost. Our analysis identifies the conditions under which certain return policies are beneficial or detrimental to omnichannel retailers. We discover that the retailer's product pricing, return losses, and consumer return hassle costs are the main factors influencing the best return policy and inventory policy decisions. Moreover, whether to increase or decrease store inventory and the relationship between physical inventory and return loss depend on the return policy, price, and return hassle cost. Numerical simulations support our findings, which offer practical guidance for omnichannel retailers aiming to optimize their inventory and return policies

Improving Data Quality, Model Functionalities and Optimizing User Interfaces in Decision Support Systems

This dissertation contributes to the research on three core elements of decision support systems for managers and consumers: data management, model management and user interface. With respect to data management this dissertation proposes an approach for reducing unobserved product heterogeneity in online transaction data sets. The example of an online auction data set is used to investigate the approach’s ability to improve data quality. In the area of model management this dissertation contributes an approach to elicit consumer product preferences for exponential (beside linear) utility functions aiming at predicting consumers’ utilities and willingness-to-pay for individual products. The question which utility function (linear or exponential) is better suited for predicting product utilities and the willingness to pay is evaluated using a laboratory experiment. Further, in the area of user interfaces this dissertation deals with information visualization. Focusing on coordinate systems, a laboratory experiment is used to investigate which visualization format (two or three dimensional) is better suited for supporting simple vs. complex decision making scenarios and which criteria matter when choosing a visualization format for a particular level of decision making complexity