New retail model in a digital world

With the following thesis, we will analyze the increasingly strong description of retail distribution and e-commerce. The main purpose will be to analyze the recent phenomenon of integration between online and offline e-commerce sites, i.e. how the online store also becomes a physical store to improve its distribution, improve times and above all the method of delivery of products previously purchased online, and at the same time as physical stores seek integration with online sales channels. And so how a business, whether born as an online or physical store, tries to unify all the sales channels by reaching the Omni-channel strategy. Several studies have been done on this new retail model, but none of them has analyzed the impact of this type of strategy on stock prices and this analysis will be carried out using the event study method. This study does not take into account other possible events during the period under consideration, therefore some estimates may be distorted. For a better explanation of the phenomenon, the following thesis has been divided into two parts. In the first part the phenomena of retail trade and e-commerce will be explained, how they were born, their evolution over time and how the advent of e-commerce has influenced the retail trade and how this integration between online and offline of the store, also giving a look at the data on e-commerce in Italy. In the second part we will analyze three specific cases to give a more specific example of this phenomenon and a study will be made on them taking into consideration the stock prices to see how these particular events affect the financial market, in particular the variation of the their stock exchange listing. The three cases that we will analyze are those of Amazon with the acquisition of the supermarket chain "Whole food market" in America and the case of Alibaba with the opening of its own supermarket chain "Hema" in China. Finally, the last case taken into consideration concerns the reverse process, or rather the passage from the only offline sale to the online one to try to counter the competition of these giants. In particular we will analyze the Walmart case with the acquisition of Flipkart.com, with the aim of also pursuing an Omni-channel strategy together with other acquisitions, with the result of being today one of Amazon's main competitors in America, recording results positive in continuous growth.