Digitalization of High Street Retail: Design, Development, and Evaluation of a Multi-sided Digital Community Platform

Betzing Jan Hendrik

Abstract

In many cities, high street retail has lost ground due to the rise of e-commerce and digital retail business models, which is particularly damaging to traditional small and medium-sized businesses. This thesis examines how local businesses can jointly participate in digitalization. A digital platform is designed, implemented, and evaluated, which connects the digital and physical high street. Customers can plan their shopping trips, track them digitally while shopping, receive personalized offers, and interact with retailers. Companies and city officials receive data-driven insights into customer behavior to adapt their offers according to their needs. From a theoretical point of view, the work integrates aspects of customer experience and service research regarding value co-creation with methods from information systems to derive design knowledge for IT platforms in high street retail.

Keywords
Retail; Digitalization; IT Artifact; Customer Experience; Design Science Research