The Informatization Development Trend of Chinese Retailing

Chinese retailing has a great development in recent years. During this fast development, Chinese retailing has demonstrated two characteristics, i.e., increasing industrial concentration, and more popular chain operation. Both of these characteristics require informatization. In order to have a grasp of informatization status of Chinese retailing, we conducted a survey by sending questionnaires to 500 Chinese retailers. 139 questionnaires were completed and returned with a response rate of 27.8%. By analyzing these data, it is shown that informatization has gained an extensive attention of Chinese retailers. It is claimed that most Chinese retailers lie in the initiation stage of informatization with informatization mainly applied in some basic modules, such as inventory, procurement. ERP as an important managerial software was also considered in this survey. It is discovered that leadership involvement and project management are the critical success factors of ERP implementation. Chinese retailers also take a positive and more cautious attitude toward new information technologies, such as RFID