Get your business off the ground with a killer brand and get the sales you want!

It's a great time to be an independent retailer! Whether you're a novice or seasoned professional, this practical how-to guide shows you how to start and run your business in today's marketplace -- from your original dream and the day-to-day operations to establishing a connection with customers and increasing your sales, both on the Web and at a brick-and-mortar shop.

Get lessons from real-life experience -- the author shares his expertise in retail business (from his mistakes to his triumphs) and reveals what it takes to be successful

Master all the basics of launching and growing a retail business -- from writing a business plan and finding a great location to hiring and keeping great staff

Meet and exceed the expectations of today's consumer -- discover how to create positive shopping experiences, provide top-notch customer service, and earn customer loyalty

Spread the word without going broke -- find out how to differentiate your business, generate word-of-mouth advertising, and plan effective sales and promotions

Bonus CD Includes

Forms, templates, and samples to simplify your business, from managing employees and inventory to tracking financial performance, creating sales and marketing tools, and adding signage to your store

See the CD appendix for details and complete system requirements.

Open the book and find:

The 10 keys to retailing success

How to design stores that work

Where and how to buy merchandise

The best ways to make your business memorable

Expert tips for building your Web site and selling online

Advice for handling legal and accountingissues

In-the-trenches, proven management practices

A crash course in the art of selling

Retailers must be primed to face increasingly difficult trading conditions thanks to the rise of the internet, increasingly better informed consumers, technological advances and an often competitive environment. This established textbook, now in its third edition, helps to provide students with the necessary skills to understand and tackle these challenges. Retail Product Management explains the importance of retailing as a customer-focused activity and helps to provide students of courses such as "Retail Marketing", "Retail Management" and "The Retail Environment" with an excellent introduction to this important topic. With an emphasis on the operational side, this text incorporates features including expanded case vignettes, questions for further discussion, and application tasks. It also includes a new chapter on ethical and sustainable retail product management. Retaining the popular style and elements of the first two editions, Rosemary Varley's Retail Product Management will continue to find favour with students and lecturers involved with retailing.

Featured in The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Vox, The Shopping Revolution is "a brisk and thought-provoking anatomy of shopping in the 21st century" (Kirkus Reviews). The retail industry was already in the midst of unparalleled disruption. Then came COVID-19. In a fully updated and expanded edition of The Shopping Revolution: How Retailers Succeed in an Era of Endless Disruption Accelerated by COVID-19, Wharton professor Barbara E. Kahn, a foremost retail expert, examines the companies that have been most successful during a tsunami of change in the industry. She offers fresh insights into what we can learn from these companies' ascendance and continued transformation in the face of unprecedented challenges. Kahn, also the author of Global Brand Power: Leveraging Branding for Long-Term Growth, examines:In a brand-new chapter, how companies in China, like Alibaba, JD.com, and Pinduoduo have changed the game;How Amazon became the retailer of choice for a large portion of the US population, and how other companies have chosen to work with them or have to compete against them; How Walmart beat out other grocers in the late 1990s to become the leader in food retailing, and how they must pivot to hold their leadership position today; How Warby Parker dared to compete against Luxottica in the lucrative eyewear business, and what that can tell start-ups about how to carve out a niche against a Goliath; How Sephora drew away customers from once-dominant department stores to become the go-to retailers for beauty products. Kahn argues we are just witnessing the start of the radical changes in retail that have been hastened by the pandemic and will revolutionize shopping in every way. Building on these insights, Kahn offers a framework that any company can use to create a competitive strategy to survive and thrive in today's-and tomorrow's-retail environment.

Focusing on global value chains and their importance to trade, this edited collection explores the strategic role of logistics and supply chain infrastructure in the development of Africa. Skilled authors present critical analysis of the current state of logistics in Africa, and suggest improvements to policy and practice which address the issue of poor trading relationships. This book will engage entrepreneurs, academics and policy-makers interested in international business, raising awareness of the need for better trade infrastructure in Africa in order to ensure the continent's economic development.

Say what you will about Wal-Mart and the retailing giants. According to authors Chris Thomas and Rick Segel, of Retailing in the 21st Century, there will always be room for a solid, well-run local store or regional chain with excellent service and or an interesting market niche. Thomas and Segel show students how to be that merchant.
This book will help students understand how to start a retail business from the ground up. The authors' focus throughout the book is on being organized and purposeful and knowing every step of the way where the business is going and why. The major goals include learning to strategize, expect the best but prepare for the worst, create a positive work environment, and keep yourself and your staff motivated to find the best merchandise and offer it enthusiastically to your customers at a fair price. After reading this book, students will be prepared to be a successful retailer in the 21st century.

This book presents a series of studies analyzing critical factors that promote and constrain textile & clothing (T&C) production and trade in the Belt & Road (B&R) countries, and forces that drive the restructuring and transforming of global T&C supply chain and operations in the B&R context. The book also offers insights into the challenges and opportunities for T&C manufacturing in B&R countries through interviews with T&C experts, and also examines how Hong Kong can strengthen its "super-connector" role by facilitating sustainable trade and development in the T&C industries, as well as discussion on the impact of global trade wars on T&C trade. In the studies presented in this book, they offer topics ranging from the macro-economy, international business environment and strategies, logistics and supply chain, policy changes, to sustainability. The studies offer descriptive, theoretical and empirical analyses that explore T&C business and management related opportunities and challenges that are derived from the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Econometric analysis with the gravity model is applied to T&C trade and extended to cover other areas that have not been considered in previous studies, such as production costs, export supply chain costs, technologies, demographical factors, and factors related to the business environment and policies, including qualitative variables. Studies using in-depth interviews and linear regression analysis are also present to explore new factors for T&C trade and production relocation to B&R countries.

This book examines the political connections and trade relations between Italy and China, with particular emphasis on the second half of the 19th century and the period following the Second World War. In recent years, economic relations between the two countries have intensified as a result of increasing exchange and trade agreements, with positive impacts on their political and diplomatic relations. By studying original public sources such as the Archives of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Bank of Italy and the Central State Archives in Rome, the author offers a historical perspective on the evolution of the two countries' economic and political ties. The respective chapters address e.g. the role of international governmental authorities, the role of the Italian Bank of China, the impact of trade agreements and foreign investment projects, etc. Given its scope, the book will appeal to scholars of economic history and international economics, as well as political scientists and legal scholars with an interest in international diplomacy and trade agreements.

'Retail Marketing Management covers all the essential theories needed to understand the complicated business of retail: from understanding the consumer and purchasing of the product through to store layout and communications. The writing style is easy to follow, and the text is supported by diagrams and case studies which enhance understanding and learning. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to learn more about the retail business.' Nicole Dunlop, Course Director, London College of Fashion, UK Retail Marketing offers a contemporary approach that combines retail marketing theory, current retail management practice and international examples. It begins by looking at the nature of retailing as an activity and then introduces retail marketing, followed by a discussion of consumer behaviour, the retail marketing mix, and other important issues such as location strategies, branding and ethics. The authors and expert contributors take an integrated approach to explaining the process of internationalisation, and the inclusion of international examples reinforces this approach. The book is ideal for undergraduate and postgraduate students taking courses in retailing, as well as those studying for marketing and business degrees where retail marketing is a core module. The blend of retail theory, practice and live examples will also be of interest to practitioners in retailing and related industries. Key features Case studies and seminar discussion questions in every chapter Chapters and vignettes by expert contributors with a combination of academic and industry experience Retail practitioner cases which emphasise practical aspects as well as key theories in retail marketing New models that help to visualise interactions between marketing environments, retail marketing management decisions, and shopper behaviour Related online materials, including powerpoint slides About the authors Helen Goworek lectures in the School of Management at the University of Leicester, where she teaches postgraduate modules in marketing, including 'B2B Marketing and Supply Chain Management'. She is the author of two previous books about the fashion business, in addition to journal articles focusing on fashion buying and sustainability. Dr Peter McGoldrick has held four professorial posts in retailing, and is currently at the University of Manchester, UK. He has published several books and over 150 research papers and articles, which have appeared in the Journal of Retailing and Harvard Business Review, among others. Best Paper awards include those at the World Marketing Congress and the 2014 Academy of Marketing Science.

Learning how to build useful e-commerce applications is challenging and exciting because it involves knowing a little about a lot of different computing technologies including networking, security, programming, human computer interface design and database design. This is a book that brings breadth in its coverage of technologies and discusses how to integrate them to achieve business aims.

It covers the full range of relevant web technologies and protocols and it focuses particularly on techniques that are most suitable for e-commerce application building.

"highly recommendable ...The major strength of the book is the fact that it is comprehensive, and that by following the code examples, readers will be able to actually see how e-commerce web sites can be put together. "
Fintan Clear , Brunel University

"the text clearly provides an extremely full and appropriate coverage of the issues. As such it has major market potential as a core text for both postgraduate and undergraduate e-commerce programmes."
Ian Chaston, Reader in Management University of Plymouth, UK

"a very comprehensive and up to date description of the use of the internet to buy and sell goods and services. It covers all the major types of e-commerce, Business to Business (B2B), Business to Consumer (B2C), Consumer to Business (C2B) and Consumer to Consumer (C2C)."
David Wortley, Mass Mitec.

"the technical content is excellent"
Maxime Bombardier, Senior Computer Systems Analyst, Sintaks, a Canon USA Division

This book examines the challenges that ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) members need to overcome in order to sustain and intensify economic growth. The ASEAN market is widely regarded as a new hub of growth, not least in light of increasing protectionism and declining economic growth of the three largest countries in Northeast Asia (China, Japan, and South Korea). Contributors address a range of issues with a concentrated focus on evidence from Indonesia, including globalisation, increasing populism, trade, FDI, the benefits of the production network, and related issues such as spill-over, crises, innovation and technology, and selected sectoral commodity and policy analysis of Indonesia. This book analyses and explains the relationship between trade and foreign direct investment, and technical changes, with regard to improving 'productivity' in the supply-side economic growth model using, in particular, Indonesia as the de facto leader of ASEAN. This book will be of interest to academics and students specialising in international economics and international development.

This edited volume examines global power-rivalry in and around South Asia through Bangladeshi lenses using imperfect and overlapping interest concentric-circles as a template. Dynamics from three transitions -the United States exiting the Cold War, China emerging as a global-level power, and India's eastern interests squaring off with China's Belt Road Initiative, BRI-help place China, India, and the United States (in alphabetical order) in Bangladesh's "inner-most" circle, China, India, and the United States in a "mid-stream" circle, and the United States and Latin America, among other countries, in the "outer-most" circle, depending on the issue. In an atmosphere of short-term gains over-riding long-term considerations, the desperate, widespread search for infrastructural funding inside South Asia enhances China's value, raises local heat, releases new challenges, with costly default consequences looming, issue-specific analysis overtaking formal bilateral relations and a stubborn uncertainty riddling the Bangladeshi air as its policy preferences stubbornly show more certainty.

This book focuses on strategies to achieve economic diversification in Asian landlocked countries. It does so by analysing the impact of the Dutch disease, non-resource firm heterogeneity, trade logistics operations, trade facilitation, aid for trade, small and medium-sized enterprises, and foreign direct investment. Offering a wide range of expert views and opinions, research findings, information and data, the book will be of value to policy makers and students of trade and development economics.

This book offers essential insights into various management concepts for retail and consumer packaged goods companies. Addressing a range of topics in the field of performance management, it presents concepts for management control, management reporting, planning & forecasting, as well as digitization-related aspects. The contributing authors share valuable lessons learned from real-world consulting projects and present innovative approaches to successful and effective management control at retail and consumer packaged goods companies.

Managing Retail Consumption explores retailing primarily from the customer's viewpoint, as well as placing the subject in its wider social context. In this new book, Barry Davies and Philippa Ward give both the student and manager of retailing a unique perspective on consumption that balances marketing, management and the social sciences. Using this interdisciplinary approach, the authors consider the way retail spaces are both created and manipulated. They also explore the interplay between the retailer's provision and the consumer's ability to structure, manage and edit individual responses.

FEATURES

• Includes concise histories of retail development and the birth and growth of consumer culture.

• Investigates retailing through the metaphor of drama, using the Servuction model as a framework.

• Illustrates retail practice with examples from many well-known international organizations, e.g. Aldi, Marks & Spencer, Mitsukoshi, Nordstrom and Wal-Mart.

Managing Retail Consumption is written for those studying retailing at advanced undergraduate and postgraduate levels, as well as those actively manging the retail environment

"This book provides a significant contribution to the discursive analysis of service encounters. It demonstrates, in a very elegant way and based on a solid empirical investigation, how mediated discourse analysis may be enacted to describe and understand the social and cultural practices associated with space, time, ethnicity and identity construction. A must-read for researchers and practitioners interested in language use in professional contexts." -- Laurent Filliettaz, University of Geneva, Switzerland "This book contains one of the most thorough and productive applications of the theoretical and analytical apparatus of mediated discourse analysis I have come across, demonstrating how the moment-by-moment ways that people appropriate discourse to perform mundane daily activities such as shopping contribute to the broader maintenance of social identities and communities. The analysis is meticulously undertaken and communicated in clear, elegant prose. This book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of discourse studies." -- Rodney Jones, University of Reading, UK This book investigates the social practices of service encounters in the context of a typical Persian shop in Sydney. Although by nature goal-oriented speech events, the book posits that service encounters are not simply limited to achieving business transactions, but that they incorporate a range of social and discursive practices. Analysing ethnographic data using the frameworks of Mediated and Multimodal Discourse Analysis, the author explores how people use everyday activities to enact social and cultural identities, construct linguistic authenticity, and maintain strong economic ties to the community. It will be of interest to scholars and students of the sociolinguistics of ethnic/ minority sites and urban spaces. Dariush Izadi holds a PhD in Sociolinguistics and teaches Language and Linguistics Research Methods, Sociolinguistics, Discourse Analysis and TESOL Units at Western Sydney University, Australia. In his work, he applies mediated discourse and nexus analysis to investigate practices and methods through which participants accomplish their actions in social settings.

The ability to collaborate, particularly in new manufacturing technology development, is becoming a corporate competence that will determine which companies survive in the next decade. With the advent of the telecommunications and information infrastructure realized in the 1990s, companies that can effectively collaborate to get new technologies applied will stand a greater chance of remaining competitive in today's market.

Collaborative R&D offers the methods and metrics for developing collaborative technology programs and partnerships, both within the industry and between major competitors. R&D experts Allen and Jarman provide a complete map for collaboration, taken from their collective years of experience in creating, promoting, and managing many collaborative R&D initiatives over the past decade. They include the guidelines for determining what technology development areas are appropriate for collaboration, and what ingredients need to be in place for it to be successful.

The authors' experiences are detailed in a format that walks the reader through the process of identifying, starting, and managing collaborative R&D programs. Having developed these programs with companies like Ford, Texas Instruments, Boeing, AT&T, and Kodak, Allen and Jarman include numerous real-world examples, which show how to choose collaborative partners, how to use the government in establishing R&D programs, successful management techniques, means of addressing intellectual property, and how to address accounting concerns.

The book also illustrates the significant benefits of collaborative R&D, helping managers and technology professionals realize its value by enabling them to make the most knowledgeable decisions and take the best actions possible, in any given situation. Among some of the benefits that have resulted from the authors' collaborative programs:

• Pratt & Whitney developed software tools that enabled them to keep one of their plants from closing.
• Ford reduced a two-week design process to four hours.
• An acceleration by at least a year in 32 key Printed Wiring Board research tasks resulted in research savings of about $35.5 million.

  Collaborative R&D is valuable reading for any business that plans to thrive in a new global economy where all available financial and human assets will need to be leveraged for the greatest return—and with minimal risk.

  "R&D means innovation, productivity, and growth—the three things our economy needs the most. This important new book explains how and why the R&D revolution is transforming American industry, a theme everyone who cares about the future of our economy should understand." —Jerry Jasinowski, President, National Association of Manufacturers.

  "Allen and Jarman provide the definitive pathway to competitive advantage through collaborative R&D, the new tool for cost-effective innovation in the twenty-first century." —Leo Reddy, President, National Coalition for Advanced Manufacturing.

  "Collaboration among companies is very new in American industry. Most companies are still striving to have their own employees collaborate with each other. This book portrays the strength and power of intercompany collaboration." —Jack E. Swindle, Senior Vice President, Texas Instruments.

  "This is a must read for any entrepreneur thinking of becoming involved in cross-organizational collaboration, for any corporate executive concerned about how cross-organizational R&D collaboration will help his company to remain competitive in the future, and for any manager who is responsible for managing people involved in cross-organizational collaborative efforts." —Dr. Ann Majchrzak, Professor of Information Systems, Marshall School of Business, University of Southern California

  "Collaborative R&D is mandatory reading for any enterprise leader looking to expand and leverage market influence." —Mike McEvoy, Vice President, Advanced Engineering and Design Center, Baxter Healthcare Corporation.

Few entrepreneurs can claim to have actually changed the way we live, but Ray Kroc is one of them. His revolutions in food service automation, franchising, shared national training and advertising have earned him a place beside the men who founded not merely businesses but entire new industries. But even more interesting than Ray Kroc the business legend is Ray Kroc the man. Not your typical self-made tycoon, Kroc was 52 when he met the McDonald brothers and opened his first franchise.

Examining street vending as a global, urban, and informalized practice found both in the Global North and Global South, this volume presents contributions from international scholars working in cities as diverse as Berlin, Dhaka, New York City, Los Angeles, Calcutta, Rio de Janeiro, and Mexico City. The aim of this global approach is to repudiate the assumption that street vending is usually carried out in the Southern hemisphere and to reveal how it also represents an essential-and constantly growing-economic practice in urban centers of the Global North. Although street vending activities vary due to local specificities, this anthology illustrates how these urban practices can also reveal global ties and developments.

This book provides an overview of evolving patterns of trade partnership with historical perspective. It presents changing requirements of industry competitiveness and explains the vital relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. As well, it further examines the interactive relationships between trade partnerships and industry competitiveness. In recent years, with decreasing strategic alliances among nations and less visibility of international governance mechanisms (e.g., WTO) and counter to globalization, preferential trade agreements and free-trade agreements have proliferated among nations. At the same time, industrial competitiveness is becoming a serious strategic policy priority of nations-both advanced and emerging economies. Theoretical discussion focuses on the practices of global network capabilities for the top of the pyramid (ToP) and base of the pyramid (BoP). Special focus is on trade partnerships and industry competitiveness in the Asian economies (China, Japan, South Korea, India, Indonesia), three ASEAN nations (Vietnam, Thailand, and Malaysia), and Mexico. Extensive industry and firm-level case studies discuss ToP and BoP interface capabilities in the form of manufacturing and services life-cycle management, which extends value creation and delivery of manufacturing and services. This extension integrates the cloud ecosystem, such as timely data/information/knowledge flows via the virtual world; and ground value chains, such as the flow of complex real goods and services in the visible world.

Retail Geography and Intelligent Network Planning demonstrates the importance of geographical thinking in a wide variety of situations. The book exemplifies the importance of sophisticated and intelligent spatial analysis techniques in dealing with the range of location, distribution and channel management issues which now face retail and service businesses. This technology is especially crucial in an age when traditional channels of physical distribution such as bank branches and shops are increasingly complemented by electronic and virtual channels.

Building on the success of Intelligent GIS (1996), which set out the principles and applications of GIS and spatial modelling for strategic planning, this new title concentrates on the concept of retail intelligence applied to retail planning by presenting examples relating to a wide range of business problems.

Retail Geography and Intelligent Network Planning is an innovative book in several ways:

• Explores some of the key retail trends impacting on retail location and store location studies by drawing on research undertaken in grocery and supermarket retailing, financial services, travel and leisure in Europe, North America and Australasia

• Examines the role of e-commerce and its growth, and argues that geography will still be crucial to its success in the retail sector

• Presents readers with various spatial analysis methods and their usefulness for addressing retail growth strategies such as branch optimization.

• Draws examples from the authors' own expertise over the past fifteen years in retail consultancy

This book is invaluable reading for professionals working in retail location teams and consultancies, and for students studying retail geography, GIS , marketing and management.

This book is devoted to establishing a completely new concept within economics referred to as "trading economics" which is a reconstructed economic system in theory that seeks perfect harmony between micro and macro elements in a structured way, hence making the economic theory a rigorous system supported by internal logical continuity. Representing a revolution of the existing theoretical framework, trading economics has changed the logic of mainstream economics. Specifically, it deduces the "macro whole" from the "micro individuals", and it introduces a systematic and comprehensive analysis approach. It stresses that within an interconnected world, the interaction between trading agents is the fundamental driving force behind the operation, development and evolution of the economic system.

This open access book belongs to the Maritime Business and Economic History strand of the Palgrave Studies in Maritime Economics book series. This volume highlights the contribution of the shipping industry to the transformations in business and society of the postwar era. Shipping was both an example and an engine of globalization and structural change. In turn, the industry experienced and pioneered, mirrored and enabled key developments that led to the present-day globalized economy. Contributions address issues such as the macro-level shift of shipping's centre of gravity from Europe to Asia, the political and legal frameworks within which it developed, the strategies and performance of both successful and unsuccessful firms, and the links between the shipping industry and the wider economy and society. Without shipping and its ability to forge connections and networks of a global reach, the modern world would look very different. By bringing together scholars from various disciplinary and national backgrounds, this book advances our understanding of the linkages that bind economies and societies together.