Michael Möhring, PhD candidate from München University at the Business Information Systems group, will defend his PhD theses on May 4, 2018. The work addresses the topic of returns management in e-commerce. Reviewers are Prof. Rainer Schmidt (Hochschule München), Prof. Stefan Tai (TU Berlin) and Prof. Kurt Sandkuhl. The following abstracz summarizes the work.
The e-commerce sector shows permanent growth. As a result, the number of product returns is also rising steadily. Especially in Germany, product returns are challenging as well as very costly for online stores. Preventive product returns management is striving for preventing product returns.
Previous research was mainly conducted in other countries with different legal settings. Furthermore, it did not provide a comprehensive picture of preventive product returns management. This work develops a comprehensive conceptual framework for preventive product returns management. Thus, the conditions, designs and effects of preventive product returns management can be shown in both research and practice. Essential design of preventive product returns management can be implemented in the (IT) processes of the online shop. Furthermore, instruments of the preventive product returns management, as an essential core aspect of the developed framework, were implemented at a leading German online shop and evaluated by three field experiments. An essential instrument of product reviews was enhanced by text mining and its effects were examined in a quantitative online study. Furthermore, implementation recommendations for the online shop were derived and underpinned with practical experience. Especially static implemented decision processes should be changed towards more dynamic processes.
The dissertation used a Design Science approach as a research paradigm. In summary, implications, limitations and opportunities for future research are defined.