The roll-out of Wal-Mart store openings followed a pattern that radiated from the center out with Wal-Mart maintaining high store density and a contiguous store network all along the way. This paper estimates the benefits of such a strategy to Wal-Mart, focusing on the savings in distribution...

Technology effects, business process development, and productivity growth are considered in the context of a single company: Wal-Mart. The starting point is the 2001 McKinsey Global Institute report, which finds that over 1995-2000, a quarter of U.S. productivity growth is attributable to the...

This paper compares consumers' brand exploration when shopping online versus in a brick-and-mortar store. I use a new scanner dataset to compare the behavior of households shopping online and in-store at the same chain, for identical items and prices. I find that brand exploration is more...

Barcodes and barcode scanners transformed the grocery industry in the 1970s. I use store-level data from the 1972, 1977, and 1982 Census of Retail Trade, matched to data on store scanner installations, to estimate scanners' effect on labor productivity. I find that scanners increased a store's...

This updated edition of the book blends in new e-commerce technologies. Mobile commerce (M-commerce) and use of cloud computing are offering a new set of challenges and opportunities for those individuals who know what they are and how they are related to e-commerce. Their use opens up new...

We estimate the sensitivity of Internet retail purchasing to sales taxes using data from the eBay marketplace. Our first approach exploits the fact that seller locations are revealed only after buyers have expressed interest in an item by clicking on its listing. We use millions of location...

Usury laws cap the interest rates that lenders can charge. Using data from Prosper.com, an online lending marketplace, I investigate the effects of these laws. The key to my empirical strategy is that there was initially substantial variability in states' interest rate caps, ranging from 6% to...

AbstractThis chapter presents the subject of quality management in an e-commerce context. The chapter presents a brief overview of the basics of quality management as they are applied in both service and manufacturing operations. The chapter then explains why quality management principles are...

AbstractThis chapter presents the topic of purchasing management in the context of e-commerce. The chapter presents JIT purchasing principles and talks about purchasing management benchmarking. The chapter then explains why purchasing management is so important in an e-commerce setting. Finally,...

AbstractThis chapter discusses supply chain management in an e-commerce environment. The chapter introduces the concept of supply chain management and related issues, followed by the supply chain design process. The chapter then explains the relevance of e-commerce in supply chain management. It...