Analysis of the potential of virtual stores for german online grocery retailing

• Autor(a) principal: Thelen, Bastian
• 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/10071/11506
• topic: E-commerce; M-commerce; QR-codes; Virtual stores; Online grocery shopping; Mobile grocery shopping; German grocery market

Research Problem – The effects of digitalization had a huge impact on people’s everyday life. With increased use of internet, E-Commerce became hugely popular and pressurized classic brick and mortar retailers. However, the grocery market is one of the few markets without a remarkable share of online sales. Recently various players entered the small but promising market. Still, it is not foreseeable which player and which kind of sales approach will prevail and retailers are searching for innovative, business approaches that help customers to find their way into online grocery shops. Tesco carried out one propitious sales approach – they established Virtual Stores in Metro Stations where commuters could shop for their groceries on their way to work including a convenient delivery after finishing time. Purpose of the Study – This dissertation strives to identify the potential of Tesco’s Virtual Stores approach for commercial uses in German online and mobile grocery retailing and determines if there is an adequate target group, which is likely to use Virtual Stores to do their everyday grocery shopping. In addition, another aim is to understand the motivation of consumers to use Virtual Stores and to develop a model in order to predict their behaviour. Design/Methodology/Approach – A quantitative baseline study (n=259) is stating the basis of the present study, in order to test the research hypothesis grounded on a literature review of secondary research. Descriptive, bivariate and multivariate analysis have been accomplished to infer meaningful results. Findings/Implications – There is a high number of potential Virtual Stores users among the respondents. Their Behavioural Intention to use Virtual Stores can be measured by their perception of the performance of Virtual Stores, the degree to which they think shopping with Virtual Stores is fun, the degree to which they perceive online grocery shopping is common, their personal openness towards new information technology and their involvement concerning grocery shopping.