Explores the concept of viewing retail customers as partial employees. When retailers provide services to customers, they tend to rely solely on store employees, missing out on a hidden asset, their customers. When shopping, customers perform two roles: in‐role; and extra‐role. The former...

Summarizes the papers presented at The Second Marketing Science and the Internet Conference entitled: “Understanding Consumer Behaviour on the Internet”, held in Los Angeles, 28‐30 April 2000. Identifies key topical issues and future research agendas. Starts from the premise that research...

With the phenomenal growth of direct order marketing with the Internet and catalogs as alternative channels, customers increasingly face more choices of where to purchase goods and services. This paper develops a formal consumer model to explain channel switching behavior. Becker’s theory of...

Banks and other financial institutions have nowadays a keen interest in their customers’ bank and mode of bill payment selection criteria, and in factors underlying this decision making. Recent developments in the financial services industry, for example increasing competition, co‐operation,...

The shift from physical (brick and mortar) stores and hard copy catalog stores toward electronic stores (e‐tailing) may be seen as a continuous innovation building on past changes brought about by in‐home shopping methods such as catalog, TV and direct mail. Why are e‐tailers then having...

Using an online survey this paper examines the personality traits and shopping characteristics of high and low intentioned wireless application protocol (WAP) shoppers. Results indicate that individuals with a high intention to use WAP shopping have both similar and contrasting characteristics...

Examines the importance of e‐commerce in the retail economy. The analysis is placed in the broader context of economic and social change and provides a theoretical framework for evaluating the growth of e‐commerce as a major distribution channel. By exploring the results of the recently...

While interactions in the real world shopping are mainly based on face‐to‐face activities between consumers and service personnels, interactions in electronic commerce take place mainly through the retailer’s Web site. This study investigated the relationship between various...