Omni-Channel Retailing and Firm Performance from a Customer Lifetime Value Perspective

In the digital era,retailers are keen to find out whether omni-channel retailing helps improve long-term firm performance.In this paper,we employ machine learning techniques on a large consumption data set in order to measure customer lifetime value(CLV)as the basis for determining long-term firm performance,and we provide an empirical analysis of the relationship between omni-channel retailing and CLV.The results suggest that omni-channel retailing may effectively enhance CLV.Further analysis reveals that this process is influenced by heterogeneous consumer requirements and that significant differences exist in the extent to which the omni-channel transition may influence CLV depending on consumer preferences for diversity of commodities,sensitivity to the cost of contract performance,and sensitivity to warehousing costs.Hence,retailers should provide consumers with a complete portfolio of goods and services based on target consumers’heterogeneous requirements in order to increase omni-channel efficiency.

Downtown Retailing Development Under Suburbanization——A Case Study of Beijing

The role of retailing has diminished in the center of cities of Western countries since its heyday in the 1920s. This trend was caused by violent transformations in the economic, social and locational contexts which involve resi- dential suburbanization, as well as new forms of commercial development out of town. As far as transforming China is concerned, the downtown retailing center has also come to turning point of development in the context of suburbaniza- tion. Based on the survey of Beijing residents’ shopping behavior, the present research tends to making clear the actual change and development problem of downtown retailing center. Combining with the macro retailing environment, re- lated influencing factors are further discussed too. Study results show that downtown retailing still plays an important part in resident’s shopping activity. However, with rapid urban sprawl, retailing in urban center has been greatly threatened by booming out-of-town commerce. In the course of such spatial change, the suburbanization of resident, the prevalence of new commercial forms and the change of consumers’ life style all have exerted their own pressure on downtown retailing. But for the special socioeconomic background of development and the support of government policy, it will still keep its vitality of retailing for a long period of time.

Wal-Mart's Corporate Culture and the Suggestions for China's Retailing Industry in Culture-Building

With sales at a quarter of a trillion and over 1.3 million employees,Wal-Mart has been the biggest retailing success ever before.A lot of Wal-Mart’s success was attributed to the strong and pervasive culture at the company.China’s retailing industry should really learn something about corporate culture-building from this excellent enterprise,so that one day it would become a strong competitor both home and abroad in retailing industry.

Sustainable Development and Transition of Traditional Retailing Centers in Beijing from Consumers' Perspective

Based on the consumer questionnaires of the three traditional retailing centers,Qianmen,Wangfujing and Xidan in Beijing,this article analyzes the present features of consumer composition in the three retailing centers.What is more,the evolution course and function transition of traditional retailing centers is revealed based on the changing of consumer composition in different times.Lastly,the renewal method and development trends of traditional retailing centers are discussed based on the evaluation results in consumers'perspective.

Development of Intelligent Garment Coordination and Virtual Try-on System for Fashion Retailing with RFID Technology

Improving customer experience has become a more and more important role in enhancing customer service in fashion retailing business. In this study, a kind of intelligent garment coordination and try-on system for fashion retailing was proposed. Radio Frequency Identification （RFID） technology was used to identify customer and garment item automatically. The intelligent procedure for garment coordination recommendation using Artificial Neural Network （ANN） was developed to imitate fashion designers＇ decision-making on garment coordination. Virtual try-on algorithm based on the customer＇s 2D/mago was accomplished using imagewarping technique. The system architecture and the software framework were also described. The results show that the ＇system is a practical and useful application for fashion retailers.

The Role of New Retailing Formats in the Italian Local Development

In Italy, and particularly in its southern area, super-markets and hyper-markets still represent an expanding retailing format, as they were introduced years later than in other western countries. Today, they have become large retailers capable of influencing local development from an economic, social and urban perspective. The literature concerned with their effects on the local economy has focused on labour markets, price dynamics, and inter-type competition, neglecting their impact on macroeconomic factors such as GDP, value added specific sectors--agriculture, industry and services. This study tries to contribute to fill this gap by empirically investigating associations between key characteristics of these retailers and specific macroeconomic value added factors

Assessment of Beef Quality Determinants in the Retailing Premises

This study explains how infrastructure and beef processing practices in beef retailing premises (BRPs) are useful for beef purchasing decision. In this respect, features and beef retailing practices were assessed against the questionability of beef that is retailed in least developing countries (LDCs). This assessment was carried out by testing the null hypothesis that hypothesizes that BRPs in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya cities do not comply with the FAO technical requirements. The retailed beef in many BRPs is compromised with the status of the infrastructural development, the situation that may result in the questionability of the consumed beef. The Likert based information regarding 22 beef quality impacting factors (BQIF) from BRPs in Dar es Salaam and Mbeya, respectively, was analyzed with respect to the gaps identified and beef retailing conceptual model. This study is important as it provides general picture in connection to the status of the assessed BQIF in BRPs for the cities in the least developing countries (LDCs). In this regard, the study has shown that the compliance of BRPs in the LDCs’ cities is too weak to meet the infrastructural technical requirements due to existence of more stringent provisions in the developed specifications. The study finally identified the local infrastructural beef quality determinants in LDCs’ BRPs as the gap to be bridged by other studies.

A Two-Level Purchase Problem for Food Retailing in Japan

In this paper, we deal with a purchase problem for food retailing, and formulate a two-level linear programming problem with a food retailer and a distributer. The food retailer deals with vegetables and fruits which are purchased from the distributer;the distributer buys vegetables and fruits ordered from the food retailer at the central wholesale markets in several cities, and transports them by truck from each of the central wholesaler markets to the food retailer’s storehouse. We solve the two-level linear programming problem in which the profits of the food retailer and the distributer are maximized.

Why and how retailing companies in China should operate in low-carbon mode?

Nowadays low-carbon development has become a hot issue of the whole world.This article first introduces the background of low-carbon economy,and then explains the importance of retailing companies in social economy and the reasons why they should operate in low-carbon mode.More specifically,low-carbon operation can not only improve the competitiveness of a retailing company by reducing operation cost and formatting good corporate image,but also benefit the whole society by reducing environment pollution and promoting low-carbon consumption and production.Only by adopting low-carbon operation pattern can retailing companies confront the fierce international competition.To illustrate the above point of view,several cases of famous western retailing companies will be analyzed in this essay.Tesco,Wal-Mart and Carrefour are all typical examples in low-carbon operation because they all have great green and sustainability initiatives.Based on the advanced experiences of the above-mentioned companies,this essay discusses the low-carbon operation ways,putting forward some valuable suggestions on this problem.From a technical perspective,retailing companies should adopt advanced technologies relating to low-carbon operation.On the other hand,management level of retailing companies should be enhanced to ensure the application effect of low-carbon technologies.Retailing companies should improve the ability of internal management to excavate the internal potential and build green supply chain to corporate with strategic partners.Finally,this article gives the conclusion of the whole analysis.

Share of Wallet in FMCGs Retailing:Proposing a Conceptual Model

Recent years,the Marketing Science Institute considered marketing performance measurement(MPM)a priority in marketing research and managerial practice.Several contributions on the same topic have been proposed in literature.The ability to measure the marketing performance is considered,a cognitive gap that determined a decrease of marketing relevance within firm and organizations.Based on relevant literature on retailing and an explorative case study,it will be proposed a conceptual and pragmatic model to investigate MPM for a consumer goods retailer.The model is aimed to identify antecedents of“share of purchase”,“share of wallet”,and“share of visit”.An early test of the model has been carried out on three Italian leading chains:Superò,a master franchisee of SMA Spa(owned of 27 small supermarkets under control of the French Auchan Group),Decò-Multicedi(the Group is a multi-channel company based on network of five Ad Hoc cash&carry centers,253 Decòoutlets and three Ayoka pet shops)located in Campania Region.“U2”(the outlets label of Unes Spa,Finiper Group,operating mostly in northern Italy,with a chain of more than 190 direct and franchise supermarkets).

Review of Artificial Intelligence with Retailing Sector

This research service provides an original perspective on how artificial intelligence(AI)is making its way into the retail sector.Retail has entered a new era where ECommerce and technology bellwethers like Alibaba,Amazon,Apple,Baidu,Facebook,Google,Microsoft,and Tencent have raised consumers’expectations.AI is enabling automated decision-making with accuracy and speed,based on data analytics,coupled with selflearning abilities.The retail sector has witnessed the dramatic evolution with the rapid digitalization of communication(i.e.Internet)and;smart phones and devices.Customer is no longer the same as they became more empowered by smart devices which has entirely prevailed their expectation,habits,style of shopping and investigating the shops.This article outlines the Significant innovation done in retails which helped them to evolve such as Artificial Intelligence(AI),Big data and Internet of Things(IoT),Chatbots,Robots.This article further also discusses the ideology of various author on how AI become more profitable and a close asset to customers and retailers.

Supply Chain Engineering in China's Retailing Industry: A Case of Meiyijia

This paper addresses the supply chain engineering and its application in China’s retailing industry. Based on the approaches of systems engineering, we propose the concept of supply chain engineering, which applies the idea of supply chain management to the engineering practices through the advanced information and management technology, to integrate the supply chain system and optimize its operations. We then illustrate the application of the supply chain engineering in China’s retailing industry. In such practices, we developed the virtual retailing enterprise mode and the FROM-SCM system, and designed the sales assistant etc. Such theory and practices are successfully applied in Meiyijia, which has transformed Meiyijia from a traditional retailer to a modern service enterprise, and the profits are resulted from the service fees rather than the traditional surplus between buying and selling prices. Now Meiyijia has built an ecosystem with the retailer in the core, the headquarter as the service platform. The success of Meiyijia in recent years shows the effectiveness of the supply chain engineering.

The Interrelationship between Culture and Capital Structure:Evidence from International Retailers

The present study investigates the influence of cultural factors in 2022 on the capital structure of global retailers.There are sixteen retailers from eight countries in the sample.In recent times,numerous academicians have taken an interest in examining the capital structure and business model of retailers,owing to their swift and consistent growth.However,the fact that the majority of research originates from the retailers’host country gives rise to debate regarding the applicability of the capital structure of said retailers to countries with distinct cultural environments.Consequently,academics have begun to investigate whether the capital structure of multinational retailers is impacted by the diversity of national cultures.

EVENTS CALENDAR

China Sees Rising Retail Sales in Q1 China’s retail sales of consumer goods,a major indicator of the country’s consumption strength,climbed 4.7 percent year on year in the first quarter of 2024.The figure was slightly lower than the 5.5 percent rise registered during the January-February period,according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics(NBS).

What Slowdown?

China remains a key source of growth and profits for many multinationals In March,Apple opened its largest retail store on the Chinese mainland in Shanghai-the company’s second-largest flagship store after its Fifth Avenue outlet in New York.The new addition brings Apple’s store tally in Shanghai and the Chinese market to eight and 57,respectively,a significant milestone for the company,which opened its first store in China in 2008.

Architecting the Metaverse: Blockchain and the Financial and Legal Regulatory Challenges of Virtual Real Estate

There has been disagreement over the value of purchasing space in the metaverse, but many businesses including Nike, The Wendy’s Company, and McDonald’s have jumped in headfirst. While the metaverse land rush has been called an “illusion” given underdeveloped infrastructure, including inadequate software and servers, and the potential opportunities for economic and legal abuse, the “real estate of the future” shows no signs of slowing. While the current virtual space of the metaverse is worth $6.30 billion, that is expected to grow to $84.09 billion by the end of 2028. But the long-term legal and regulatory considerations of capitalizing on the investment, as well as the manner in which blockchain technology can secure users’ data and digital assets, has yet to be properly investigated. With the metaverse still in a conceptual phase, building a new 3D social environment capable of digital transactions will represent most of the initial investment in time in human capital. Digital twin technologies, already well-established in industry, will be ported to support the need to architect and furnish the new digital world. The return on and viability of investing in the “real estate of the future” raises questions fundamental to the success or failure of the enterprise. As such this paper proposes a novel framing of the issue and looks at the intersection where finance, technology, and law are converging to prevent another Dot-com bubble of the late 1990s in metaverse-based virtual real estate transactions. Furthermore, the paper will argue that these domains are technologically feasible, but the main challenges for commercial users remain in the legal and regulatory arenas. As has been the case with the emergence of online commerce, a legal assessment of the metaverse indicates that courts will look to traditional and established legal principles when addressing issues until the enactment of federal and/or state statutes and accompanying regulations. Lastly, whereas traditional regulation of real estate would involve property law, the current legal framing of ownership of metaverse assets is governed by contract law.

Customer Segment Prediction on Retail Transactional Data Using K-Means and Markov Model

Retailing is a dynamic business domain where commodities and goods are sold in small quantities directly to the customers.It deals with the end user customers of a supply-chain network and therefore has to accommodate the needs and desires of a large group of customers over varied utilities.The volume and volatility of the business makes it one of the prospectivefields for analytical study and data modeling.This is also why customer segmentation drives a key role in multiple retail business decisions such as marketing budgeting,customer targeting,customized offers,value proposition etc.The segmentation could be on various aspects such as demographics,historic behavior or preferences based on the use cases.In this paper,historic retail transactional data is used to segment the custo-mers using K-Means clustering and the results are utilized to arrive at a transition matrix which is used to predict the cluster movements over the time period using Markov Model algorithm.This helps in calculating the futuristic value a segment or a customer brings to the business.Strategic marketing designs and budgeting can be implemented using these results.The study is specifically useful for large scale marketing in domains such as e-commerce,insurance or retailers to segment,profile and measure the customer lifecycle value over a short period of time.

Optimization of Electricity Purchase and Sales Strategies of Electricity Retailers under the Condition of Limited Clean Energy Consumption

In the process of my country’s energy transition,the clean energy of hydropower,wind power and photovoltaic power generation has ushered in great development,but due to the randomness and volatility of its output,it has caused a certain waste of clean energy power generation resources.Regarding the purchase and sale of electricity by electricity retailers under the condition of limited clean energy consumption,this paper establishes a quantitative model of clean energy restricted electricity fromthe perspective of power system supply and demand balance.Then it analyzes the source-charge dual uncertain factors in the electricity retailer purchasing and selling scenarios in the mid-to long-term electricity market and the day-ahead market.Through the multi-scenario analysis method,the uncertain clean energy consumption and the user’s power demand are combined to form the electricity retailer’s electricity purchase and sales scene,and the typical scene is obtained by using the hierarchical clustering algorithm.This paper establishes a electricity retailer’s risk decisionmodel for purchasing and selling electricity in themid-and long-term market and reduce-abandonment market,and takes the maximum profit expectation of the electricity retailer frompurchasing and selling electricity as the objective function.At the same time,in themediumand longterm electricity market and the day-ahead market,the electricity retailer’s purchase cost,electricity sales income,deviation assessment cost and electricity purchase and sale risk are considered.The molecular results show that electricity retailers can obtain considerable profits in the reduce-abandonment market by optimizing their own electricity purchase and sales strategies,on the premise of balancing profits and risks.

More and More Retail Brands Integrate ESG into Development

Recently, Savills and the U.S. Green Building Council released Sustainable Retail-Staying on Track(hereinafter the report), which pointed out that the ranking of the 20-city retailer index in 2022 changed the most in the past five years, but that Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Chengdu are still among the top four retailers in 2022. The sustainable retail index of coastal cities including Ningbo, Qingdao and Xiamen has greatly improved.

Clothing Sales Forecast Considering Weather Information: An Empirical Study in Brick-and-Mortar Stores by Machine-Learning

Reliable sales forecasts are important to the garment industry. In recent years, the global climate is warming, the weather changes frequently, and clothing sales are affected by weather fluctuations. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether weather data can improve the accuracy of product sales and to establish a corresponding clothing sales forecasting model. This model uses the basic attributes of clothing product data, historical sales data, and weather data. It is based on a random forest, XGB, and GBDT adopting a stacking strategy. We found that weather information is not useful for basic clothing sales forecasts, but it did improve the accuracy of seasonal clothing sales forecasts. The MSE of the dresses, down jackets, and shirts are reduced by 86.03%, 80.14%, and 41.49% on average. In addition, we found that the stacking strategy model outperformed the voting strategy model, with an average MSE reduction of 49.28%. Clothing managers can use this model to forecast their sales when they make sales plans based on weather information.