IoT-commerce - opportunities for customers through an affordance lens

Abstract

Retail commerce is influenced by digital technologies at large scale. After electronic commerce and its evolution into mobile commerce, we now see that the Internet of Things (IoT), one of the most disruptive developments in recent times, is about to radically transform retail commerce from need recognition to post-purchase engagement and service. Extant literature mainly investigates technical features of IoT, missing out on a customer-centric perspective. Theoretically founded in Activity and Affordance Theories, this paper conceptualizes IoT-commerce, identifies opportunities for customers, and links them to the customer buying process. Based on an extensive literature review, twelve affordances are derived and evaluated with a sample of real-world IoT devices. All affordances offered by electronic and mobile commerce are still valid for IoT-commerce but extended by three affordances unique to IoT-commerce: context-aware services, natural interactions, and automated customer processes. Affecting all steps of the customer buying process, IoT-commerce is worth to be understood by researchers, customers, and companies.

Unraveling the capabilities that enable digital transformation: A data-driven methodology and the case of artificial intelligence

“…The top four are ICT (#1), social networks (#2), AI (#3), and IoT (#4)all digital technologies. From a full reading of some of the papers in these clusters, we find that disruptiveness is a characteristic shared by all topics [63,69,70]. By disruption, we mean they have the capability to shake up industries, trigger the development of new business models, and segment markets in new ways [71].…”

“…By disruption, we mean they have the capability to shake up industries, trigger the development of new business models, and segment markets in new ways [71]. The papers in these clusters articulate how the technologies they discuss can enable DT [64,66,68,69,[72][73][74], and they present empirical evidence to prove it [62,65,75]. Thus, the social implication of the technologies in this cluster is also a research focus.…”

Internet of Things for Electronic Markets

“…The efficiency of this work is evaluated in terms of accuracy, end-user satisfaction, and Pearson correlation coefficient. The second paper is authored by Sarah Bayer, Henner Gimpel and Daniel Rau and it is entitled "IoT-commerce -opportunities for customers through an affordance lens" (Bayer et al 2021). The authors present an extensive review and conceptualize IoT-based commerce, find opportunities for customers, and interconnect them to the customer buying preferences.…”

An Approach to Assessing Shopper Acceptance of Beacon Triggered Promotions in Smart Retail

“…Understanding the applications and benefits of the IoT and smart retail technologies is another research topic that has significant attention from scholars [7,26,[32][33][34][35][36]. However, only a few recent papers aimed to resolve the gap of frameworks and processes that could be useful for retail practitioners in the deployment of the IoT in a retail environment [2,[37][38][39][40][41]. Despite the initial hype around beacon technology [42] and trials with implementation, this technology still lacks mass adoption in retail.…”