Editorial
Retail digitalization: Implications for physical stores

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Introduction: digitalization and physical stores

Digitalization is dramatically transforming society, and distinctly so within the field of retailing. Following the emergence of the Internet and new technology, new patterns and logics have emerged, and scholars have paid increasing attention to what is described as a digital transformation of retailing. However, until recently the focus has primarily been on e-commerce (Hagberg et al., 2016). E-commerce is certainly growing and increasingly encompassing both large and small retailers, and the

What does “implication” imply?

“Implication” is a common word in research papers and there are often requests from journals to include it in headlines such as “research implications”, “managerial implications”, “practical implications”, etc. However, what does the notion of “implication” actually imply? On the basis of the papers included in this Special Issue, we can distinguish at least three nuances of the term implication, each with a different emphasis, which also have significance for how we understand retail

The papers

In this section, the six appended papers that, after a double review process, comprise the Special Issue, will be briefly summarised. Together, the papers lay a promising foundation for how to understand retail digitalization and the implications for the physical store as discussed above. Not only do these papers represent and discuss different aspects of retail digitalization and the implications for physical stores, they also build on different methods and methodological considerations. The

Contributions and future research

The aim of this Special Issue was to focus on retail digitalization and implications for the physical stores. Based on the six papers, a promising research agenda arises. First of all, and contrary to how retail digitalization–at least to date–has been described in the context of physical stores, the authors of this Special Issue point towards not only challenges but also opportunities. All of the papers contribute to a more nuanced discussion on the implications of retail digitalization for

Acknowledgements

The editors of this Special Issue would like to thank all of the participants in the EIRASS special session in Edinburgh 11–14 July 2016, the authors of the individual papers, all the anonymous reviewers for their contributions in the two rounds of double-blind reviews for all the papers, as well as professor Harry Timmermans, for his support of this Special Issue. The editors’ work with this Special Issue was performed within the project “Digitalization and Changing Business Models in Retail

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