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• Case | HBS Case Collection | November 2016 (Revised July 2018)

  Selling on Amazon at Tower Paddle Boards

  Thales S. Teixeira and David Lopez-Lengowski

  By June 2012, Stephan Aarstol felt that he had successfully passed the first critical stage of his ecommerce business. As the founder and CEO of a standup paddleboard (SUP) business, he had built a strong relationship with Asian manufacturers, built a small warehouse and fulfillment center, designed an innovative line of inflatable SUPs, and built an ecommerce website that sold boards and accessories to consumers. After the rising trend in interest for the sport provided a strong wave of growth in sales, Aarstol contemplated the next stage at Tower Paddle Boards. Should he partner with Amazon to sell his full line of boards--manufactured under his brand--and accessories--manufactured by other brands? Should he sell to Amazon? Should he sell on Amazon marketplace? Or should he avoid the powerful online retail giant altogether?

  Keywords: Tower Paddle Boards; Amazon; e-commerce; online shopping; Distribution; Online Technology; Business Growth and Maturation; Marketing Channels; Distribution Channels; Decision Choices and Conditions; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry;

  Citation:

  Teixeira, Thales S., and David Lopez-Lengowski. "Selling on Amazon at Tower Paddle Boards." Harvard Business School Case 517-047, November 2016. (Revised July 2018.)  View Details

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• Article | Journal of Marketing | June 2018

  Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips

  Xuan Liu, Savannah Wei Shi, Thales S. Teixeira and Michel Wedel

  Consumers have an increasingly wide variety of options available to entertain themselves. This poses a challenge for content aggregators who want to effectively promote their video content online through original trailers of movies, sitcoms, and video games. Marketers are now trying to produce much shorter video clips to promote their content on a variety of digital channels. This research is the first to propose an approach to produce such clips and to study their effectiveness, focusing on comedy movies as an application. Web-based facial-expression tracking is used to study viewers’ real-time emotional responses when watching comedy movie trailers online. These data are used to predict both viewers’ intentions to watch the movie and the movie’s box office success. The authors then propose an optimization procedure for cutting scenes from trailers to produce clips and test it in an online experiment and in a field experiment. The results provide evidence that the production of short clips using the proposed methodology can be an effective tool to market movies and other online content.

  Keywords: Film Entertainment; Marketing; Online Advertising; Performance Effectiveness; Performance Improvement;

  Citation:

  Liu, Xuan, Savannah Wei Shi, Thales S. Teixeira, and Michel Wedel. "Video Content Marketing: The Making of Clips." Journal of Marketing 82, no. 4 (July 2018): 86–101.  View Details

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• Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

  The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment

  Donald Ngwe and Thales S. Teixeira

  Online retail accounts for a rapidly growing proportion of revenues in many industries. While selling online broadens firms’ access to consumers, operating margins are often lower in online stores than in physical stores. There are well-recognized reasons for this discrepancy: prices are easy to compare online, discount coupons and codes have high uptake, and sellers often bear the cost of shipping products to buyers. In addition to these factors, online selling precludes many methods of price discrimination exercised in offline environments. Many online stores present few barriers to accessing discounted products. We propose that deliberately increasing search frictions by placing obstacles to locating discounted items can improve online retailers’ margins and increase conversion. We demonstrate using a simple theoretical framework that inducing consumers to inspect higher-priced items first can simultaneously increase the average selling price and the overall purchase rate. We test these predictions in a series of field experiments conducted with an online fashion and apparel retailer. Using information from historical transaction data about each existing consumer, we demonstrate that price-sensitive shoppers are more likely to incur search costs in order to locate discounted items. Our results show that adding search frictions can be used as a self-selecting price discrimination tool to match high discounts with price-sensitive consumers and full-priced offerings with price-insensitive consumers.

  Keywords: e-commerce; online retailing; effor; search costs; price discrimination; friction; Marketing; Consumer Behavior; Price; Fashion Industry; Retail Industry; Southeast Asia; Philippines;

  Citation:

  Ngwe, Donald, and Thales S. Teixeira. "The Impact of Increasing Search Frictions on Online Shopping Behavior: Evidence from a Field Experiment." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-114, June 2018.  View Details

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