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Introduction
Digitalization[1] is one of the most significant on-going transformations of contemporary society and encompasses many elements of business and everyday life. This transformation is important for the retail sector, which both affects and is affected by this development. Retailers provide consumers with various digital products and services that are adapted to the use of digital technologies and are simultaneously affected by the new forms of consumption associated with these digital technologies. While digitalization has a long history in retailing (see, e.g. Salkin, 1964; Watson, 2011), the significance of the transformation is becoming increasingly visible.
With the emergence of the internet, scholars have taken great interest in the implications for retailing (e.g. Alba et al., 1997; Peterson et al., 1997; Burt and Sparks, 2003). These implications include changing business opportunities (e.g. Quelch and Klein, 1996), business models (e.g. Osterwalder and Pigneur, 2002; Sorescu et al., 2011), forms of commerce (Gloor, 2000), purchasing processes (Grewal et al., 2013), and the transformation of local shops into global markets (Wrigley and Currah, 2006). Nonetheless, digitalization has so far primarily been addressed in terms of e-commerce. Although e-commerce is part of digitalization, its impact extends far beyond e-commerce and includes the transformation of physical products into digital services, consumer recommendations in social media, and the incorporation of digital devices into the purchasing process – such as online information searches leading to offline purchases (see, e.g. Pauwels et al., 2011).
A central facilitator of these broader effects of digitalization is the increasing use of mobile devices that connect to the internet, which have begun to change consumer practices, including shopping behaviours in fixed-store settings. New consumer products with mobile internet access are launched at a rapid pace, often linking to other technologies (Cochoy, 2012), and mobile devices are becoming increasingly important in the retail setting (Shankar et al., 2010). Although mobile devices may work as a substitute for activities previously performed by laptops, they also provide additional features, such as barcode scanning, location-based services, and near field communication (Ström et al., 2014). These mobile devices are converting the internet into an element in physical stores (Bodhani, 2012), which has driven the emergence of new retail formats, such as pop-up stores (Kim et al.