Mentor: Francesco Lelli

Co-Supervisor: Second Reader will be assigned based on the finalization of the proposal from the student.

What is the value of your website for an SME or a professional service? Internet as a selling channel is a vastly explored domain. However, a set of business may not have a direct benefit from this channel as they require a more personal touch or are intrinsically “offline businesses”. That is the case of babysitters, lawyers, tailors, thinkers, property managers, cleaners, etc. These professions may advertise their presence in Internet; however, most of the relationship evolve offline in a personal manner.

This thesis proposal intends to evaluate and quantify the benefit of an online presence for such businesses and the effect that a public profile may have in establishing the trust that is needed to engage in a constructive relationship.

This project does not involve an internship. Instead, it will try to have a high academic relevance and theoretical contribution and, based on the quality of your work the candidate may be able to publish the results in the proceedings and scientific journals.

Are you curious and would like to know more?

This video (courtesy of google) will give you an overview of the landscape:

Full list of videos available here:

If you are curious and you what to know more about the topic, I recommend you the following:

• Watch some of the videos of the Digital Garage channel of Google. You will get familiar of the landscape
• A few non intuitive keywords that you may want to use in google scholar: Consumer trust, internet presence, B2C, Offline Shopping, Social Presence, Online Shopping, Shopping Behavior.

Would you like to know how some scholars are approaching this problem? Here you can find some initial pointers for a more exhaustive research:

• The Determinants and Consequences of Consumer Trust in e-retailing: a conceptual Framework.
• Past purchase and intention to purchase in e‐commerce: The mediation of social presence and trust
• Exploring online and offline shopping motivational values in Malaysia
• Multi-channel consumer perceptions

Suggested methodology: you are probably going to build a survey

Tools: a non-exhaustive list of tools that you may want to consider using includes R, SPSS, Google Forms, Qualtrics, Excel, etc.

Data: you will build your own dataset and will give you the opportunity to take advantage of open science best practices.

If you are interested in the topic, do not hesitate to contact me for more information. Please contact Francesco Lelli.

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