The authors examine the implications of electronic shopping for consumers, retailers, and manufacturers. They assume that near-term technological developments will offer consumers unparalleled opportunities to locate and compare product offerings. They examine these advantages as a function of typical consumer goals and the types of products and services being sought and offer conclusions regarding consumer incentives and disincentives to purchase through interactive home shopping vis-à-vis traditional retail formats. The authors discuss implications for industry structure as they pertain to competition among retailers, competition among manufacturers, and retailer-manufacturer relationships.

Interactive home shopping: Consumer, retailer, and manufacturer incentives to participate in

During the past two decades of e-commerce growth, the concept of a business model has become increasingly popular. More recently, the research on this realm has grown rapidly, with diverse research activity covering a wide range of application areas. Considering the sustainable development goals, the innovative business models have brought a competitive advantage to improve the sustainability performance of organizations. The concept of the sustainable business model describes the rationale of how an organization creates, delivers, and captures value, in economic, social, cultural, or other contexts, in a sustainable way. The process of sustainable business model construction forms an innovative part of a business strategy. Different industries and businesses have utilized sustainable business models’ concept to satisfy their economic, environmental, and social goals simultaneously. However, the success, popularity, and progress of sustainable business models in different application domains are not clear. To explore this issue, this research provides a comprehensive review of sustainable business models literature in various application areas. Notable sustainable business models are identified and further classified in fourteen unique categories, and in every category, the progress -either failure or success- has been reviewed, and the research gaps are discussed. Taxonomy of the applications includes innovation, management and marketing, entrepreneurship, energy, fashion, healthcare, agri-food, supply chain management, circular economy, developing countries, engineering, construction and real estate, mobility and transportation, and hospitality. The key contribution of this study is that it provides an insight into the state of the art of sustainable business models in various application areas and future research directions. This paper concludes that popularity and the success rate of sustainable business models in all application domains have been increased along with the increasing use of advanced technologies.

Sustainable Business Models: A Review

The advent of the Internet has significantly changed consumption patterns and habits. Online grocery shopping is a way of purchasing food products using a web-based shopping service. The current COVID-19 pandemic is determining a rethinking of purchase choice elements and of consumers’ behavior. This work aims to investigate which characteristics can affect the decision of online food shopping during the pandemic emergency in Italy. In particular, the work aims to analyze the effects of a set of explanatory variables on the level of satisfaction for the food online shopping experience. For achieving this aim, the proportional odds version of the cumulative logit model is carried out. Data derive from an anonymous on-line questionnaire administrated during the first months of the pandemic and filled by 248 respondents. The results of this work highlight that people having familiarity with buying food online, that have a higher educational level and consider food online channels easy to use, appear more satisfied for the food online shopping experience. These findings can be crucial for the future green global challenges as online shopping may help to reach competitive advantages for company sustainability.

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/12/22/9594/pdf

How the Covid-19 Pandemic Is Changing Online Food Shopping Human Behaviour in Italy

This research is to examine the impact of online channels on food stockpile behavior.,In this study, we use bivariate probit models to empirically investigate the impact of online purchasing channels on Chinese urban consumer food hoarding behaviors with random survey samples.,Results show that fresh food e-commerce channels are more likely to be associated with panic stockpile behaviors due to higher likelihood of supply shortages than offline channels with government assistance in logistic management. In contrast, community group buy, another format of e-commerce, appears superior in satisfying the consumer needs and easing the panic buying perception.,It suggests that online channels may have diverse impacts on consumers' panic stockpiling behaviors during the extreme situations. Online channels need to develop efficient supply chains to be more resilient to extreme situations and the government shall recognize the increasing share of the online channels together with traditional offline channels when implementing supporting policies.,With ever increasing share of online channels, it is imperative in terms of policy implications to understand how would online channels affect hoarding behavior.,We are the first study in online shopping's impact on food stockpile during pandemics using a random sample. Although food stockpile behavior at times of emergency have been investigated in many literature, there are no empirical studies on the impact of online channels on stockpile behaviors under extreme situations. Unlike disasters that immediately impact every entity in supply chains covering producers, vendors, distribution centers and retailers, pandemics did not render supply chains affected immediately, but rather increase consumers' willingness to shop online to avoid virus. Thus, Covid-19 provides a natural experiment to investigate the online channels' impact on stockpile behavior.

/pdf/the-impact-of-online-grocery-shopping-on-stockpile-behavior-3054j8bzuw.pdf

The impact of online grocery shopping on stockpile behavior in Covid-19

Determinants of online food purchasing: The impact of socio-demographic and situational factors

In this paper, we provide a simple conceptual framework with empirical analysis to investigate the effect of product attributes and e-vendor characteristics that are potentially included in the online shopper’s information search on their online shopping behavior in China.,This paper examines consumers’ online shopping frequency for food/grocery using an ordered logit model and for fresh food (a subcategory of food/grocery) using a two-part model, considering product attributes, e-vendor characteristics, and consumer perceptions and characteristics.,The results show that product origin is an influencing factor in shopping for fresh food online, reflecting consumers’ growing interests in imported food or specialty food from other areas. Consumers are more likely to shop online for fresh food if they perceive online shopping as having a price advantage. But consumers who view price as a top factor are less likely to buy fresh food online frequently. Thus competitive prices might be a motive for online fresh food shopping, but consumers concerned about price do not necessarily shop frequently. Negative perceptions of product freshness reduce consumers’ likelihood and frequency of shopping for fresh food online. Concerns on food quality and e-vendors’ credibility prevent consumers from frequently shopping for fresh food online. Social and demographic characteristics also influence consumers’ decisions.,This paper provides a better understanding of consumer’s online grocery shopping preferences and sheds light on policy and regulation design and implementation in the e-commerce industry, which will ultimately protect and benefit consumers.

Robin Zhang

Papers

What factors affect Chinese consumers’ online grocery shopping? Product attributes, e-vendor characteristics and consumer perceptions

Chinese Preference for Online Grocery Shopping: Shopping for Convenience, Quality or Price?