Online Shopping - Publications - Faculty & Research

27 Jun 2016
Research & Ideas

These Management Practices, Like Certain Technologies, Boost Company Performance

the shop floor. The second concerned the ways in which firms used that data in meetings and how they set targets, from upper management to frontline workers. The third had to do with human resources, looking at how workers were hired,... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding

28 Jun 2021
Research & Ideas

Keep or Cut Workers? How Companies Reacted to the COVID-19 Crisis

increase during the pandemic. During the pandemic, Amazon hired as many new workers as all other Standard and Poor’s 500 companies combined. Online retailer Wayfair also prospered. Where the axe fell On the other hand, View Details

Keywords: by Lane Lambert

29 Nov 2022
Research & Ideas

How Much More Would Holiday Shoppers Pay to Wear Something Rare?

holiday shopping season. With record inflation, rising interest rates, and economic jitters weighing on consumers, pricing strategies could become more critical to getting customers to buy during the coming weeks and beyond. The rare red... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Retail

11 Jul 2006
First Look

First Look: July 11, 2006

into online payments. PayPal, owned by eBay, has targeted online merchants outside eBay's auction community for its next wave of expansion. Google represents a potential threat to PayPal's "off... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

17 Dec 2014
Research & Ideas

How Our Brain Determines if the Product is Worth the Price

pricing can be found in the article Deconstructing the Price Tag.) The Brain Shopping Experiment In a series of experiments, participants went shopping—while lying on their backs inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)... View Details

Keywords: by Carmen Nobel; Retail

16 Nov 2010
First Look

First Look: November 16, 2010

Users? Anita Elberse and Sunil GuptaHarvard Business School Case 510-053 In January 2010, YouTube, the world's largest online video aggregator, was still seeking to become profitable. Was the time right for Google, YouTube's parent... View Details

Keywords: Sean Silverthorne

17 Jun 2017
Research & Ideas

Amazon, Whole Foods Deal a Big Win for Consumers

Source: 400tmax Editor's Note. Online retailing behemoth Amazon announced June 16 that it would acquire upscale grocery chain Whole Foods Market in a deal valued at more than $13 billion. Though the company has dabbled with the idea of a brick-and-mortar footprint in... View Details

Keywords: by Jose Alvarez and Len Schlesinger; Retail

12 Mar 2006
Research & Ideas

New Research Explores Multi-Sided Markets

School, defines these multi-sided markets as platforms that serve two or more distinct groups of customers who value each other's participation. Examples: EBay provides markets for both buyers and sellers, dating club clients are both men and women, View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Technology

16 Dec 2022
Research & Ideas

Why Technology Alone Can't Solve AI's Bias Problem

In a cluttered online world, few can resist the convenience of an automated ranking when deciding what movie to watch on Netflix or which seafood restaurant looks promising in a Google search. But when it comes to finding a job candidate... View Details

Keywords: by Michael Blanding; Technology

16 Feb 2010
Research & Ideas

The Outside-In Approach to Customer Service

centricity cannot be achieved by simply listening to customers about their experiences with Best Buy; the company has to commit to owning the customers' problems and working creatively to solve them. Faced with increased price competition from retailers like Walmart as... View Details

Keywords: by Sarah Jane Gilbert; Consumer Products

11 May 2016
Research & Ideas

Fix This! Why is it so Painful to Buy a New Car?

(Editor’s note: Fix This! is a series of occasional stories about industries that provide bad consumer experiences and how they can be fixed.) Consumers routinely list buying a car as the worst shopping experience imaginable. So it may be... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Auto

09 Dec 2019
Research & Ideas

Identify Great Customers from Their First Purchase

customers spread over six markets. The researchers extracted six variables to represent first-time customers’ acquisition behavior, including whether the purchase was made online or offline, number of items purchased, prices, discounts,... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Retail; Service

16 Jun 2020
Research & Ideas

Your Customers Have Changed. Here's How to Engage Them Again.

to give them a better chance of surviving. In contrast, industries with increasing customer demand—grocery stores, online entertainment, teleconference providers, and their suppliers—need to adjust to this directional reality at a slower,... View Details

Keywords: by Rohit Deshpandé, Ofer Mintz, and Imran S. Currim; Retail; Service

23 Jan 2013
Research & Ideas

Three-Dimensional Strategy: Winning the Multisided Platform

When start-up thredUP launched its peer-to-peer online exchange for used children's clothes two and a half years ago, its creators were the latest generation of entrepreneurs competing online as multi-sided... View Details

Keywords: by Julia Hanna

14 Jul 2020
Research & Ideas

Restarting Under Uncertainty: Managerial Experiences from Around the World

NGOs, and business associations in order to understand the challenges from multiple perspectives: psychology, sociology, law, and insurance. The group used these insights to create an open-source online guidebook. TurkFurnit translated... View Details

Keywords: by Raffaella Sadun, Andrea Bertoni, Alexia Delfino, Giovanni Fassio, and Mariapaola Testa

02 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

Retail Reaches a Tipping Point—Which Stores Will Survive?

authors look to the future—what will the shopping experience be like for us, and for retailers, as ecommerce becomes an ever larger part of the market. In early February, 93-year-old retailer RadioShack announced it was filing for... View Details

Keywords: by Sean Silverthorne; Retail

12 Oct 1999
Research & Ideas

Confronting the Challenges that Face Bricks-and-Mortar Stores

What does cyberspace mean for physical retail space? Has online shopping changed the fundamentals of retailing? How should managers evaluate new in-store technologies? Harvard Business Review posed these... View Details

Keywords: by Raymond Burke; Retail

10 Mar 2015
Research & Ideas

The Surprising Winners and Losers in the Retail Revolution

and best options in-store along with the electrical supplies and tools you will need to install the fixture. Online they carry an endless aisle of products and they provide videos and expert advice to help with installation. They do not... View Details