The future of Brick and Mortar and the myth of e-commerce

• Autor(a) principal: Dias, João Miguel Pereira
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/19973
• topic: Shopping centers; Brick and mortar; Online shopping; E-commerce; E-markets; Cannibalization; Sales; Hedonic; Utilitarian; Consumer behavior; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

Electronic market is one of this decade’s fast growing markets, achieving the milestone of $1 trillion for the first time in the history in 2012. Contrasting with this growing scenario, there is the shopping center industry which has been heavily affected not only by the economic crisis but also to a change in consumers’ habits and mindset. Retail and shopping centers management companies are becoming worried about this trend and the future of their companies. Online shopping provides consumers with ultimate levels of convenience and variety that malls will probably never be able to compete with. Therefore, the main purpose of this dissertation is to find out if online channels are cannibalizing brick and mortar sales. In order to do so, the consumers feelings, expectations and needs to each channels were assessed. As conclusion of the research, contrarily to what is stated across web, we concluded that online channels are not cannibalizing the sales of the brick and mortar industry. They are simply satisfying different needs. Moreover, consumers use online channels as a source of inspiration so that they can later on buy in a shopping center, the product they previously searched online.