Digital Technologies Within the DIY Store: A Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

Digital technologies and the resulting changes have a massive impact on economic, political, and social levels. The challenges this creates result in both opportunities and threats for numerous sectors. Successfully managing the transformations arising from digital technologies will be a formidable challenge in the future. These changes are also having a massive impact on the retail sector, which is also facing unprecedented challenges. The purpose of this paper is to deliver a contribution for management research, by providing a systematic overview of which digital technologies are being used within the brick-and-mortar stores’ POS (point of sale) in the DIY sector, and how successful they are. The underlying methodology of this paper is a systematic literature review of academic research on digital technologies used within DIY (do-it-yourself) stores to provide a current state of research in a gathered, examined, and synthesized manner. To achieve this objective and ensure consistency in the execution of the review, it has been completed following a detailed review protocol. Based on a search on Business Source Premier, EconLit, IEEE Xplore Digital Library and ACM Digital Library databases over a recent period of ten years, all relevant studies on digital technologies in the DIY sector were identified and applicable information from each study was systematically extracted. The paper yields a systematic overview and important insights into digital technologies being used in the DIY sector. A comprehensive conceptualization of these technologies has been provided, categorizing them into the most important main areas. There are numerous studies in the scientific literature on digital technologies and the resulting digital transformation. However, explicit investigations into the area of the DIY sector are minimal. This is, even though sales in the DIY sector were 701 billion euros worldwide in 2020 (DIY International, 2021). For this reason, the added value of this article for scientists and practitioners lies in providing a comprehensive conceptualization of the scientific literature on the application of digital technologies in the DIY sector. In addition, appropriate proposal recommendations for action for decision-makers in this and additional industries are presented.

Keywords

• digitization
• digital technologies
• diy
• hardware stores
• point of sale
• unique selling points
• competitive advantage
• marketing
• strategic management