The paper focuses on the German food retailing industry with its market characteristics and the status quo of online food retailing in Germany by analysing data from market research institutes and consumer direct questionnaire. The paper examines the consumers’ perceptions of online as well as offline grocery shopping. As a result, an online grocery model was created using PLS-SEM modelling. It illustrates all major success factors related to the consumer’s willingness to shop for groceries online in Germany. The main factors influencing the willingness to shop for groceries online are awareness of benefits, need for more convenience, and change of the lack of trust in the new distribution channel. We identified some consumer groups that are more open to online shopping as they benefit more from online grocery shopping. Especially working mothers and young professionals are the consumer groups with a high potential interest.
The article aims to improve existing theories of business development and crisis management with a special emphasis on inner dynamics of crises in small and medium enterprises (S.M.E.s). For these purposes, combined perspectives of system dynamics, company life cycles, crisis management, resilience and business continuity management in S.M.E.s have been used. Based on data of about 554 crises from 183 companies collected in the Czech Republic, the most common crises types and their combinations have been identified using association rules mining method. Then, a simulation system dynamics model synthesizing the main findings and allowing scenario analysis to explain and avoid some of the crises in S.M.E.s has been developed for a case study of manufacturing company. Such a simulation model enriches the present knowledge and explains complex dynamics of crises in S.M.E.s in a novel way. When properly calibrated, this model could be used as a supporting tool for decision-making in manufacturing S.M.E.s.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.