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The world of retailing is being reimagined and transformed at breakneck speeds due to new technologies, as well as due to changes in consumer purchasing behavior resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. This dynamic retail marketplace is forcing retailers to strategize how to best position themselves to survive and flourish in this environment. Recognizing that we are at a critical inflection point in the world of retailing, we conceptualize a Strategic Wheel of Retailing in the new technology era that emphasizes technology as the core enabler of the strategies related to the 6Ps of retailing (retail place and supply chain management, product, pricing, promotion, personnel, and presentation). In particular, the articles calls for retailers to carefully their review their competitive ecosystem as they adapt to the new technologies, raises some issues, and offers new directions for further research on how technology can be leveraged to design profitable retail strategies.

In this paper, the authors review current literature on retail formats and propose a new customer-centric framework for retailers to focus on as they continue to innovate and evolve. Specifically, they review the literature on how formats compare in their attributes and compete with each other; the role of customer behavior in format choice; and developments in multichannel and omnichannel retailing. They propose a framework for retail formats suggesting two paths – either reduce friction in the customer journey or enhance customer experience. They discuss the challenges faced by offline (physical store-first) and online (digital-first) retailers and elaborate on strategies each type of retailer is pursuing to address these challenges. Finally, they offer directions for future research in this domain. They conclude by calling for newer digital-first and physical-first players to continue coming up with different customer-centric formats, which they predict will slowly morph into integrated retailers, leaving space for newer players to enter the market and hence keep the wheel of retailing spinning.

Firms are increasingly turning to social media platforms for complaint handling. Previous research and practitioners' reports highlight the benefits of complaint handling on social media, urging firms to provide prompt and detailed responses to complaints. However, little research has explored the possible drawbacks of such practices, especially when responses inadvertently further publicize complaints. Utilizing two unique data sets in a series of observational and quasiexperimental analyses, this research provides the first evidence of \"complaint publicization\" in social media, a phenomenon in which firm responses to complaints on popular social media platforms increase the potential public exposure of complaints. This negative effect can outweigh any positive customer care–signaling impact from firm responses. The authors show that a response strategy that engenders a high level of complaint publicization (e.g., providing detailed responses through multiple communication exchanges with a complainant) could negatively impact perceived quality and firm value, diminish the positive impact of a firm's own posts, and increase the volume of future complaints. Additional analyses reveal that these adverse impacts are stronger for firms that are targeted by retail investors. The authors also uncover specific response strategies and styles that could mitigate these effects.

•This paper is a review of literature on the interaction between e-commerce and offline retailing.•Following literature is examined and many recommendations for future research are proposed.•Market-level impact of e-commerce on competition and complementarity between.•Impact of e-commerce on consumer search and acquisition behavior.•Acquiring and using data, digitization, assortment, pricing, and product returns. The fast-paced growth of e-commerce is rapidly changing consumers’ shopping habits and shaping the future of the retail industry. While online retailing has allowed companies to overcome geographic barriers to selling and helped them achieve operational efficiencies, offline retailers have struggled to compete with online retailers, and many retailers have chosen to operate both online and offline. This paper presents a review of the literature on the interaction between e-commerce and offline retailing, highlighting empirical findings and generalizable insights, and discussing their managerial implications. Our review includes studies published in more than 50 different academic journals spanning various disciplines from the inception of the internet to present. We organize our paper around three main research questions. First, what is the relationship between online and offline retail channels including competition and complementarity between online and offline sellers as well as online and offline channels of an omnichannel retailer? Under this question we also try to understand the impact of e-commerce on market structure and what factors impact the intensity of competition /complementarity. Second, what is the impact of e-commerce on consumer behavior? We specifically investigate how e-commerce has impacted consumer search, its implications for price dispersion, and user generated content. Third, how has e-commerce impacted retailers’ key managerial decisions? The key research questions under this heading include: (i) What is the impact of big data on retailing? (ii) What is the impact of digitization on retailer outcomes? (iii) What is the impact of e-commerce on sales concentration? (iv) What is the impact of e-commerce and platforms on pricing? And (v) How should retailers manage product returns across online and offline channels? Under each section, we also develop detailed recommendations for future research which we hope will inspire continued interest in this domain. [Display omitted]

Anthropomorphic voice assistants (e.g., Amazon Alexa) enable users to use natural-language voice commands to control “smart” objects and access the internet for information, shopping, and entertainment. Most manufacturers of voice assistants allow other firms to develop software (i.e., voice assistant functions, VAFs) related to their products and services that add new capabilities to voice assistants. To measure the value of different types of capabilities of VAFs, we empirically study the impact of announcements of VAFs on firm value. We show that informational capabilities and VAFs announced by product firms have a positive moderating effect on firm value. On the other hand, object-control capabilities have no moderating impact on firm value, while transactional capabilities have a negative impact. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed. Additionally, necessary avenues for future research within the voice assistant domain are proposed.

•Powerless consumers exhibit greater variety-seeking in their consumption behavior.•Effect of powerlessness on variety-seeking is due to need for autonomy.•Powerlessness does not enhance variety-seeking when autonomy is fulfilled.•These effects are documented in nine studies in both lab and real-world settings. How does feeling powerless (vs. powerful) affect variety-seeking in retail contexts? Based on the notion that feeling powerless is associated with lower autonomy, and building on studies showing that having a wider choice set enhances autonomy, we predict—consistent with research on compensatory consumption—that low-power consumers (vs. those with high power) will exhibit greater variety-seeking. Findings across nine studies were consistent with this prediction. Further, while all nine studies provide evidence that low-power consumers seek greater variety, three studies (1A, 1B, and 1C) support the prediction that this effect is mediated by need for autonomy and not by any of eight other competing mechanisms, including other-orientation, need for uniqueness, and risk aversion. Studies 2 and 3 explore theoretically and managerially relevant ways, respectively, of reducing the tendency for low (vs. high) power consumers to seek greater variety, while study 4 provides external (real-world) validity for our prediction in retail (i.e., a restaurant) context. The theoretical and managerial implications of our research are discussed. [Display omitted]

[Display omitted] •Empirical study of the impact of price promotions on different measures of store performance.•Lend credence to the continued popularity of promotional discounts by retailers.•Feature discounts for high penetration, high frequency items drive store traffic.•Promotions of branded items are found to be more effective than on unbranded items.•Discounting on more items in a category appears to decrease store margins. The received wisdom, reflected in popular marketing textbooks, is that featuring deeply discounted items will generate additional store traffic for retailers that in turn will lead to increased sales and profits. However, there is surprisingly little systematic evidence about the impact of these deep discounts on aggregate store traffic, sales, and profits. In this paper, we study the effects of promotional discounts and their characteristics on various store performance metrics employing a store level dataset pooled over 55 weeks and 24 stores. Many findings of our study lend credence to the continued popularity of such promotions by retailers. We find that feature promotions build store traffic, especially when the categories being featured are high penetration, high frequency. Also, promotions of branded items are found to be more effective than promotions of unbranded items. Discounting on more items in a category leads to lower store margins suggesting that the cost of discounting a large proportion of items in a category may not be justified by the profits generated by the sale. Using the coefficients from our model estimates, various counterfactuals provide insights into strategic change in level of discounts across categories. We discuss several implications of our findings for retailers.

Retailing academics and practitioners must develop close, collaborative relationships, which might involve various, meaningful efforts to assist the other side of the collaboration while also furthering their own respective objectives. Only through such collaborations can retailing ensure sufficient research rigor and relevance to advance the field and expand its reach to nonacademic audiences. To achieve some innovative insights on why and how academics and practitioners can work together, a thought leadership conference was organized at the Walton College of Business (University of Arkansas), and one of its key outcomes is this special issue. All the entries in this special issue were crafted by teams of academics and practitioners, working together to describe new frontiers in retailing. They worked collaboratively for more than a year on topical, timely, relevant topics for today’s technology-based era. The meaningful results should provide inspiration for more collaborations, pursued by both sides, with the support of university administrators and corporate executive leadership. Without the support of both, bridging the gap between research and practice is not possible.

Spurred on by the transition to omnichannel retailing and advances in technology, retail delivery process has seen many innovations in recent years. The delivery process, broadly defined, is the set of tasks needed to deliver the product from the retailer to the final consumer. Innovations pertain to modes of delivery, locations of delivery, and trade-offs between delivery speed and delivery charges. We attempt to build a typology of innovations and their use, and summarize their potential costs and benefits to retailers and consumers. It is easily seen that many of the innovations can be labor saving for retailers. But there has been little evidence on consumer reactions. For this purpose, we conduct a national survey to examine the likelihood of adoption of a number of innovations in delivery. We find that although overall interest in these innovations is not high at this early stage, there is a significantly large segment of customers who are more likely to adopt these innovations. These customers are predominantly millennials, have higher incomes, and they are tech-savvy, innovative, environmentally conscious, and value quality. The findings suggest that retailers need to be strategic about choosing targets for successfully propagating these innovations.

Temporal distance refers to the time between purchase and consumption in advanced-sales industries. We explore how the response of aggregate demand to price changes with temporal distance in a large, proprietary data set of Florida cruise prices, bookings, and product attributes. We offer the first evidence that cruise demand becomes more sensitive to price during the advance sales period, unlike extant findings in other settings. The results also show that demand is greatest late in the advance sales period, providing the first finding that a late-season high-demand period coincides with a late-season increase in aggregate price sensitivity. The high-demand effect more than offsets the high-price-responsiveness pattern, leading the firm to increase prices throughout the advance sales period. Although the data do not disentangle multiple competing explanations for the main findings, they are large enough to appear in simple data visualizations and robust enough to replicate across many model specifications, parameterizations, and partitions of the data. This paper was accepted by Matthew Shum, marketing.