Nowadays, mass customization has been embraced by a large portion of the industry. As a result, the web abounds with sales configurators that help customers tailor all kinds of goods and services to their specific needs. In many cases, configurators have become the single entry point for placing customer orders. As such, they are strategic components of companies’ information systems and must m...

Industrial countries regard the machine tool industry as strategic industry, and ensure its crucial role among industries by tremendous government supports. Nevertheless, due to the special characteristics of industrial products, such as marketing through regional agencies, less transaction number with higher amounts, longer purchase cycle, and various product models, the application of data mi...

This paper develops and tests a new model for multiple-unit adoptions of durable goods based on the diffusion modeling tradition. Multiple-unit adoptions are a major component of sales for many consumer durable product categories. For instance, sales of multiple-unit adoptions for televisions have been high than both first adoptions and replacement purchases since 1977, while for automobiles th...

The National Retail Data Monitor receives data daily from 10,000 stores, including pharmacies, that sell health care products. These stores belong to national chains that process sales data centrally and utilize Universal Product Codes and scanners to collect sales information at the cash register. The high degree of retail sales data automation enables the monitor to collect information from t...

This paper describes the implementation of a distributed case-based reasoning application that supports engineering sales staff. The application operates on the world wide web and uses the X M L standard as a communications protocol between client and server side Java applets. The paper describes the distributed architecture of the application, the two case retrieval techniques used, its implem...

C negative information about a product increase sales, and if so, when? Although popular wisdom suggests that “any publicity is good publicity,” prior research has demonstrated only downsides to negative press. Negative reviews or word of mouth, for example, have been found to hurt product evaluation and sales. Using a combination of econometric analysis and experimental methods, we unify these...

The selling of sophisticated equipment is very different from the sale of simple products and requires a considerable amount of strategizing to achieve success. In clear recognition of this fact, Canon has a sales strategy training program that uses SPIN@ selling methodology to train major account sales representatives. However, this training gets quickly lost in the multitude of daily tasks th...

Although the sales control literature acknowledges the importance of salesperson's intrinsic and extrinsic (I/E) motivation due to their correlations with sales control and sales performance, the global nature of salesperson's I/E motivation inhibits a thorough understanding of motivation in the sales control context. This study expands the literature of salesperson motivation by incorporating ...

OBJECTIVE To examine the impact of a government income management program on store sales. DESIGN AND SETTING An interrupted time series analysis of sales data in 10 stores in 10 remote Northern Territory communities during 1 October 2006 to 30 September 2009, which included an 18-month period before income management; a 4-6-month period after the introduction of income management; a 3-month p...

The convenience of shopping on-line via the Internet has become a widely accepted view. An important aspect of automated electronic sales systems is communication with the customer. Nevertheless, customers encounter quite frequently user interfaces that are hard to use – either because they have to answer annoying or irrelevant questions or they are faced with technical jargon of manufacturers ...