THE EFFECT OF THE ATTRIBUTES OF IT SHOPPING SERVICE AND THE LEVEL OF TECHNOLOGY ON CUSTOMER RESPONSES IN FASHION RETAIL
- LanguageENG
- URLhttp://db.koreascholar.com/Article/Detail/271946
pp.1198-1199
According to the development of information technology (IT) and new media, customers’ needs have changed to seek not only high quality goods but also a differentiated service in retail stores (Lee & Shin, 2011). For this reason, fashion retail stores started to provide an interesting service by setting up an IT machine or a gadget in the stores. Thereby, customers can get the information or have a special experience while they shop fashion goods. IT shopping service is defined as using technology in retail stores to enhance interaction between retailers and customers. Retailers have tried several types of IT shopping services, which offer information or experience with a high or low level of technology. Informative IT shopping service provides various and useful information, which is related to each product such as size, color, contents, stock, location and fashion styling. Retailers use experiential IT shopping service as an emotional appeal that gives direct experience to customers in some way or other such as watching or acting in a virtual situation. Also, as technology develops, IT shopping services are embodied with diverse technology that are simple or complexity. Some are easy to use with one button and shows 2D images only, but some have a lot of contents such as video clips, SNS share service, showing 3D images, and implementing augment reality. We saw customer responses on the attributes of IT shopping service (informative vs. experimental) x technology level of IT shopping service (high vs. low) x fashion innovativeness/technology innovativeness (high vs. low) This study aims to see the effect of the attributes of IT shopping service and the level of technology on procedure satisfaction and outcome satisfaction, and the moderating effect of perceived enjoyment and perceived complexity. Furthermore, this study will see whether these effects affect visit intention. In this study, the experimental design was adopted as the main methodology, and a total of four stimuli types were selected: 1) informative x high technology 2) informative x low technology 3) experiential x high technology 4) experiential x low technology. The common element, which all types of stimuli have, is a digital touch screen since it is a general equipment nowadays, and the common fashion good for all types is a black blazer. The type of informative service only has the information (size range, color assortment, contents, stock) about selected fashion good with its image. High technology in informative service shows the image with 3D simulation that can help to see 360° of the blazer, and styling tips including a video clip. Moreover, it helps to share the information with friends via SNS. Low technology in informative service only shows a front side of the blazer and presents a store map for customers to find a product they want to try. The types of experiential service draw customer participation providing a picture of customers that are trying on clothes. Experiential service use augment reality (AR) as a high technology and take the back side of customers picture as low technology. For the manipulation check, 18 graduate students in total viewed for each type, and the total sample comprises 387 college students via survey instrument. All hypotheses were tested using AMOS and SPSS 18.0. The main findings of this study are as follows: depending on type of the attributes of IT shopping service and the level of technology affect perceived enjoyment and perceived complexity differently, and there were significant mediating effect of perceived variables toward IT shopping service on procedure satisfaction, outcome satisfaction, and visit intention. Implications for usefulness and role of the IT shopping service in fashion retail stores are provided. And also, limitation of this study and future study are suggested.