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discussion of a new study titled "Store Choice and Shopping Behavior: How Price Format Works."; Research on retailing typically attributes the success of a store to its location. At the same time, marketing experts have focused a great deal of attention on the role of pricing in store performance, but without considering location. In this recent study, Bell, Ho and Tang provide managers with a new shopping framework that takes both criteria into account.

For a searchable repository of market data check out our Market Research Center

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This 58-page .pdf report from the Current Business Reports series of the Census Bureau offers a detailed summary of retail sales, purchases, accounts receivable, and inventory from January 1990 to December 1999 mostly in tabular form.

These days, it seems that both traditional bricks-and-mortar retailers and online "e-tailers" are drowning in a sea of customer information, including data from online transactions, point-of-service scanners, membership programs and even sensor chips on shopping carts. The question is, with all this sophisticated technology on hand, why have department store markdowns over the last 20 years grown from 8% to 33% of sales? And why are customers still going away dissatisfied because what they want isn't in stock? In an article entitled "Rocket Science Retailing Is Almost Here - Are You Ready?" in the July-August 2000 issue of the Harvard Business Review, Wharton operations professor Marshall Fisher and two co-authors take a hard look at why many retailers are "awash in data but starved for information."

In an article on Nov. 13, in the Financial Times' Mastering Management series, Wharton operations and information management professor Eric Clemons and Wharton Ph.D. student Michael Row note the critical importance of consumer behavior in establishing a web retailing strategy. The two researchers look at the type of relationship between buyer and seller, the scope of goods and services linking buyer and seller, and the four competitive landscapes that result from the interplay of these forces.

Find a wide selection of interviews with business luminaries in our Interviews Section

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Article discusses Toshifumi Suzuki, CEO of Seven-Eleven Japan, and his plan to turn his ubiquitous stores into a center for all kinds of commerce. Also offers some interesting background info and statistics.

Interesting look at QVC's online retailing operations and the lessons the company has learned about marrying their two primary channels.

This article takes says the following five rules have been learned about e-tailing thusfar:
Rule 1: You don't have to put the whole damn store online
Rule 2: Turn your inventory as quickly as possible
Rule 3: Customers like to know what they're buying
Rule 4: Keep shipping costs to a minimum, and don't blindside your customers with them
Rule 5: Use the Internet to get to know your customers better than ever before

Also of value is their Web File sidebar which looks at the following related issues:
- Online Sales
- Supply Chain Management
- Fulfillment
- Marketing
- Case Studies
- The Future of E-tail

Faster browsers and better software all help to provide immediate and improved service

Units let retailers expand offerings and provide customers with more information.

The principles of high performance retail are the principles of high performance business. It's 'show time' all the time - the ultimate test and the moment of truth will always be your customers' experience of your enterprise at the point of sale.

Why do some retailers expanding abroad perform better than others? This article looks at some of the reasons why and introduces the concept of psychic distance in explaining performance variations.

The author argues that to sustain a competitive advantage, Web retailers must align their strategies with the product characteristics and buying practices of customers in their market segment. He divides the dot-com retail market into four segments on the basis of the type of good sold and describes the strategies needed to succeed in each.

Note: Darwin Magazine is now dead. Some articles are moving to CIO. I will try to update the links when I have time...

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Point of sale (or bar code) data offers information riches for margin-strapped retailers and their partners-if they can overcome the technology and business hurdles to using it effectively.

Many businesses on the Internet spent wildly doing whatever it might take to attract customers to their sites. It soon became clear that the challenge was not simply to bring the customers in the door, but also to retain these customers for future purchases. The quest was on to discover what tactics had the most appeal to the Internet shopper. This study reveals survey data and behavioral data drawn from Internet customers that reflects what was most important to the Internet shoppers. Since many have viewed the Internet as creating more perfect information for the buyer, the question arises as to how important price will be in the purchase process. What becomes clear from the analysis is what is seen as crucial in bringing customers to the site are not the same dimensions critical in retaining the customer on a longer-term basis.

Consider this scenario: You establish a website and advertise products on it. When customers send in orders, you forward them to your wholesaler or distributor, who ships the orders directly to customers' homes with your company's label on them. You completely avoid the enormous costs and risks involved in inventory, warehousing, and fulfillment. Too good to be true? That depends, says a new paper by Wharton professor Serguei Netessine and two colleagues that looks at the pros and cons of drop shipping, which the authors also refer to as virtual order fulfillment.

Retailers and their suppliers could cut costs by $40 billion a year with better collaboration. Here's why they aren't counting their savings yet.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Overwhelmed by the complexities of today's marketplace, retailers are essentially letting vendors run much of their business. Here's the method to their madness.

General retailers use their expertise in a few core categories to attract customers, but over the Web they must offer more. Enter the on-line category manager.

All customers are not created equal. The companies that excel, both in the short and long term, are those that are not only thoughtful about where they acquire customers, but also learn to quickly segment the profitable, loyal ones from the fool's gold of bargain hunters.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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How a consumer is influenced by atmospheric factors - music, colours, smells - is the subject of much conjecture. What follows is a guide on how to monitor these effects and how some factors can influence spending patterns.

Overturning an existing power structure is generally the business of revolutionaries-not retailers. But a few industry leaders are turning the traditional hierarchy upside down. They are shifting power from the corporate headquarters down to the individual stores. In doing so, they are tapping into and leveraging the ideas, talents and energy of the most important competitive weapon they have in their arsenal-their store teams.

When headquarters shifts responsibility to individual stores, the best-run stores can share their successes across the chain. Thus, employees must have tools that are easy to use and that simplify store tasks. This paper identifies those tools as well as the skills that are necessary to increase success.

The paper also highlights what the top retailers do best. For example, it discusses how a handful of retailers such as Sephora use a "learning store" to create an environment that is used to examine and improve performance. The learning store acts as a laboratory, a managed experiment, to simultaneously design, test and adopt a holistic series of initiatives-while the store continues to serve customers.

Using real-world case studies, Reinventing the Store offers a step-by-step guide to implementing the learning store methodology and outlines how retailers can reap increased benefits simply by relinquishing control and handing over power to the store team.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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After 150 years, the department store concept is still going strong thanks to a husband and wife team who pioneered the 'retail experience' - a philosophy of customer service, quality and fair pricing for all.

This link was reported as bad and I was unable to find a current link.

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Using Sale Cues to Influence Customer Purchasing

Loyalty programs are profitable - if used correctly. HBS Marketing professor Rajiv Lal discusses how grocery stores get it wrong. But you can get it right.

Data-collaboration efforts among retailers and suppliers have been under way for years, but few companies have pulled it off. What's the trouble?

When consumers have a bad shopping experience, they are likely to spread the word, not to the store manager or salesperson, but to friends, family and colleagues. Overall, if 100 people have a bad experience, a retailer stands to lose between 32 and 36 current or potential customers. These are some of the conclusions of The Retail Customer Dissatisfaction Study 2006, conducted by The Jay H. Baker Retailing Initiative at Wharton and The Verde Group, a Toronto consulting firm, in the weeks before and after Christmas 2005.

Attention, shoppers: Did you find everything you were looking for? Retail customers who answer "yes" to this question might very well represent the Holy Grail to retail operators who want to increase their sales with only a modest increase in costs or, in some cases, increase sales by merely reallocating staff within a store at no extra cost. Impossible? Not according to a new study on retail store execution by Wharton operations and information management professors Marshall L. Fisher and Serguei Netessine, and Wharton doctoral student Jayanth Krishnan.

Why do some shopping malls, retail stores, popular magazines, and even Internet portals seem to purposefully make it hard for consumers to find what they want? HBS professor Andrei Hagiu and Bruno Jullien challenge the conventional wisdom that intermediaries create value by reducing search and transaction costs. Their paper sheds light on the economic motivations that in some contexts may lead intermediaries to make it harder for consumers and third-party sellers to find each other.

To a CFO, inventory is often a line item on the balance sheet that measures inventory turns against the income statement (cost of goods sold). This COGS analysis provides an overall view of how much inventory is held across the company’s supply chain. What it doesn't provide, however, are the reasons why the inventory is there in the first place or whether the return on each inventory dollar is sufficient. Is there too much inventory at the store? Is there too little at the warehouses? Answers to these questions begin with understanding what drives inventory levels.