development and greater use of this technology by consumers. The ability to use a mobile phone for shopping allows retailers to become ubiquitous, and we can see that this started in 2007 (also the year in which the Apple iPhone was introduced). Our research provides insight into the research area from two perspectives: (1) the kind of research published (the research front) and (2) the kind of research that constitutes the published research (the intellectual base). Consequently, the contributions of our study relate to the research front as well as the intellectual foundation. Peripheral role of Logistics/Supply Management research: When it comes to the research front of omni-channel retailing, the first contribution of our work is the identification of the low importance of logistics and supply chain management for omni-channel retailing, as we identified only a limited number of papers on multi/omni-channel retail logistics but comparably more contributions relating to multi/omni-channel retailing and strategy. Here, we expect more research to evolve, once retailers have adopted multi/omni-channel strategies with the respective logistics solutions. Consequently, multi/omni-channel retail logistics is considered a very promising research topic for the future. The practical consequences of omni-channel management, in particular the use of electronic channels, show an increase in home deliveries. This impacts significantly the traffic situation in many cities and challenges the existing logistics structures of urban freight flows (Anderson et al., 2005; Russo and Comi, 2010). Empirical focus and limited theoretical underpinning: The next contribution of our work relates to the identification of theoretical as well as empirical deficits in the research front. We reveal that the literature on multi/omni-channel retailing is dominated by empirical research. The identified conceptual papers are typically literature reviews aimed at enhancing the overall understanding of the research phenomenon as well as decreasing the fuzziness in the existing definitions. Formal-analytical papers focus on the development of fundamental
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