Enhancing shopping experiences in smart retailing

The retailing market has undergone a paradigm-shift in the last decades, departing from its traditional form of shopping in brick-and-mortar stores towards online shopping and the establishment of shopping malls. As a result, “small” independent retailers operating in urban environments have suffered a substantial reduction of their turnover. This situation could be presumably reversed if retailers were to establish business “alliances” targeting economies of scale and engage themselves in providing innovative digital services. The SMARTBUY ecosystem realizes the concept of a “distributed shopping mall”, which allows retailers to join forces and unite in a large commercial coalition that generates added value for both retailers and customers. Along this line, the SMARTBUY ecosystem offers several novel features: (i) inventory management of centralized products and services, (ii) geo-located marketing of products and services, (iii) location-based search for products offered by neighboring retailers, and (iv) personalized recommendations for purchasing products derived by an innovative recommendation system. SMARTBUY materializes a blended retailing paradigm which combines the benefits of online shopping with the attractiveness of traditional shopping in brick-and-mortar stores. This article provides an overview of the main architectural components and functional aspects of the SMARTBUY ecosystem. Then, it reports the main findings derived from a 12 months-long pilot execution of SMARTBUY across four European cities and discusses the key technology acceptance factors when deploying alike business alliances

What is smart for retailing?

AbstractWhile the last decade has seen increasing interest in the smart city phenomenon from both scholars and practitioners, little attention has been paid to what extent retailing might be considered as part of smart cities, with benefits for all the actors involved in the process. In fact, retailing is subject to a radical innovation force that makes available several technologies that can be successfully applied. The extensive use of advanced systems gives rise to new questions concerning the smart use of technologies. Moreover, the application of advanced technologies is part of a trend towards the creation of smart cities for a better urban society. In this scenario, the idea of smartness goes beyond the concept of application of new technologies by also including more important dimensions, such as organizational structure. Hence, our work aims at identifying what can be considered smart for retailing, in terms of features of smart technology for retailing, and the challenges emerging from the adoption of such smart technologies

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

Qualitative investigation into consumer motivations and attitudes towards research shopping in the georgian market

This study aims to discover different levels of research shopping behavior among Georgian consumers. It adopted a deductive approach by selecting the relevant models of customer behaviour from past papers and testing them in the Georgian market. In order to find the main themes associated with research shopping, five focus groups were held using exploratory and semi-structured questions. The responses were analyzed on the basis of two main customer motivations, utilitarian and hedonistic, in order to find the roots of each factor in consumer`s minds. The results indicate the important roles factors such as the retail sector, price, immediate product availability and staff training play in research shopping behaviour in the market. This research approaches the shopping motivations in a novel manner by connecting those roots to two other elements which are the retail sector and the nature of the retail outlet.Opracowanie to ma na celu ukazanie różnych aspektów badań w zakresie zachowań zakupowych wśród gruzińskich konsumentów. W artykule przyjęto podejście dedukcyjne, wybierając odpowiednie modele zachowań klienta ze źródeł wtórnych i testowanie ich na rynku gruzińskim. W celu wyodrębnienia zagadnień związanych z tematem badania zorganizowano pięć grup fokusowych przy użyciu pytań eksploracyjnych i pytań częściowo ustrukturyzowanych. Odpowiedzi przeanalizowano na podstawie dwóch głównych przesłanek motywujących klientów do zakupów, tj. przesłanek utylitarnych i hedonistycznych, tak aby zidentyfikować motywy każdej z przesłanek u konsumenta. Wyniki wskazują iż czynniki, takie jak sektor detaliczny, cena, natychmiastowa dostępność produktów i szkolenie personelu odgrywają ważna rolę w zachowaniach zakupowych konsumentów. Badania podchodzą do zagadnienia motywacji zakupowych w nowatorski sposób, łącząc motywy do podjęcia przesłanek zakupowych z dwoma innymi elementami, takim jak sektor detaliczny i charakter punktu sprzedaży detalicznej

Buy Now

How Amazon combined branding and relationship marketing with massive distribution infrastructure to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. Amazon is ubiquitous in our daily lives—we stream movies and television on Amazon Prime Video, converse with Alexa, receive messages on our smartphone about the progress of our latest orders. In Buy Now, Emily West examines Amazon's consumer-facing services to investigate how Amazon as a brand grew so quickly and inserted itself into so many aspects of our lives even as it faded into the background, becoming a sort of infrastructure that can be taken for granted. Amazon promotes the comfort and care of its customers (but not its workers) to become the ultimate service brand in the digital economy. West shows how Amazon has cultivated personalized, intimate relationships with consumers that normalize its outsized influence on our selves and our communities. She describes the brand's focus on speedy and seamless ecommerce delivery, represented in the materiality of the branded brown box; the positioning of its book retailing, media streaming, and smart speakers as services rather than sales; and the brand's image control strategies. West considers why pushback against Amazon's ubiquity and market power has come mainly from among Amazon's workers rather than its customers or competitors, arguing that Amazon's brand logic fragments consumers as a political bloc. West's innovative account, the first to examine Amazon from a critical media studies perspective, offers a cautionary cultural study of bigness in today's economy

Sustainable Development Report: Blockchain, the Web3 & the SDGs

This is an output paper of the applied research that was conducted between July 2018 - October 2019 funded by the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) and conducted by the Research Institute for Cryptoeconomics at the Vienna University of Economics and Business and RCE Vienna (Regional Centre of Expertise on Education for Sustainable Development).Series: Working Paper Series / Institute for Cryptoeconomics / Interdisciplinary Researc

SmartRegio – Employing Spatial Data to Provide Decision Support for SMEs and City Administrations

When decisions have to be made which are based on the characteristics and expected developments in specific spatial environments (such as finding the best place for a new production site or for a new shop), geo data and the information that can be derived from it plays a crucial role. While larger companies typically can afford the setup of the required organisational units as well as the access to relevant data from commercial providers, smaller organisations such as SMEs or city administrations are at a disadvantage. The aim of the SmartRegio project was to develop solutions for such organisations that combine freely available (mass) spatial data from many different sources as a decision-making basis focusing on governmental and private actors operating with a focus on a specific region. The data sources include data from infrastructures like energy and mobility, data from public entities, and also data from social media and media channels. The SmartRegio project successfully identified and tackled major technical and legal challenges when aiming to exploit such data, while at the same time realising a generic infrastructure that supports the required processes within the given context

Semantic Brokering of Multimedia Contents for Smart Delivery of Ubiquitous Services in Pervasive Environments

With the proliferation of modern mobile devices having the capability to interact each other and with the environment in a transparent manner, there is an increase in the development of those applications that are specifically designed for pervasive and ubiquitous environments. Those applications are able to provide a service of interest for the user that depends on context information, such as the user's position, his preferences, the capability of the device and its available resources. Services have to respond in a rational way in many different situations choosing the actions with the best expected result by the user, so making environment not only more connected and efficient, but smarter. Here we present a semantic framework that provides the technology for the development of intelligent, context aware services and their delivery in pervasive and ubiquitous environments

Sustainable consumption: towards action and impact. : International scientific conference November 6th-8th 2011, Hamburg - European Green Capital 2011, Germany: abstract volume

This volume contains the abstracts of all oral and poster presentations of the international scientific conference „Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact“ held in Hamburg (Germany) on November 6th-8th 2011. This unique conference aims to promote a comprehensive academic discourse on issues concerning sustainable consumption and brings together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: it is a ubiquitous social practice and an economic driving force, yet at the same time, its consequences are in conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards “sustainable consumption” has therefore become a major political issue. In order to properly understand the challenge of “sustainable consumption”, identify unsustainable patterns of consumption and bring forward the necessary innovations, a collaborative effort of researchers from different disciplines is needed