We are living in a world that is increasingly digital and undergoing dramatic changes as a result. In particular for luxury fashion, growing numbers of online customers as well as fast changing business environment, luxury retailers face the challenge of differentiating themselves by offering a better online customer experience (Chen et al. 2021). By doing so, luxury fashion retailers are increasingly deploying chatbots in their service encounters to enhance customer experience (Roy & Naidoo, 2021). Chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Hoyer et al. 2020) and are an example of AI robot that can provide human-computer interactions on a retail website (Lee et al. 2017). Intended to enhance the online customer experience, chatbots have the potential to provide a better understanding of the product performance, enable efficient use of customer time, and help build crucial customer relationships (Rese et al. 2020; Wilson-Nash et al. 2020; Xu et al. 2022). Therefore, chatbots’ potential has been highly valued by fashion retail industry and academia (Jiang et al. 2022).

This study investigated how immersive VR store experience generated consumers’ urge to buy via self-imagery and pleasure. It also identified that the processing varied by the level of self-relevance to the VR store. The findings suggest that the impact of VR store experience can be expanded to impulsive/compulsive purchases.

Despite the orientation towards online retailing journey accelerated by the application of new-age technologies in the pandemic context, the role of the physical store still has a central role in luxury shopping in the digital omni-channel perspective. Digital technologies have increased their impact on consumers (Evanschitzky et al., 2020; Klaus & Zaichkowsky, 2020; Kaplan & Haenlein, 2020; Davenport et al, 2020; Huang and Rust, 2021a; Pantano et al, 2022). In today’s digital age, AI is one of the new-age technologies raising growing interest for their potential disruptive impact on marketing and retailing in different sectors (Forbes, 2022).

This study examines the impact of price transparency—specifically the disclosure of cost breakdown—on brand attitudes and purchase intentions. The findings suggest that pricing transparency generally has a positive effect on attitudes and purchase intentions. However, pricing transparency might backfire, and thus reverse the effect, for luxury products originating from a high equity country (e.g., a fashion brand from Italy), but not for luxury and non-luxury products originating from a low equity country (e.g., a fashion brand from China). Luxury retailers in a high equity country should take extra caution before adopting price transparency

Consumer studies on millennials have focused on shopper behavioural differences with their old baby boomer generation. A significant distinction between these two groups have been their relationship and interaction with technology across all facets of life, including shopping. Millennials are generally regarded as early adopters of digital technology and its use in daily activities, hence their reference to digital natives. Compared to the baby boomers, who are late adopters and are called digital immigrants. Africa's millennials constitute at least 30% of Africa's population, making them a key attraction for marketers, yet their interests are often treated as a homogenous segment similar to global millennials from advanced economies.

We are living in a world that is increasingly digital and undergoing dramatic changes as a result. In particular for luxury fashion, growing numbers of online customers as well as fast changing business environment, luxury retailers face the challenge of differentiating themselves by offering a better online customer experience (Chen et al. 2021). By doing so, luxury fashion retailers are increasingly deploying chatbots in their service encounters to enhance customer experience (Roy & Naidoo, 2021). Chatbots are powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) (Hoyer et al. 2020) and are an example of AI robot that can provide human-computer interactions on a retail website (Lee et al. 2017). Intended to enhance the online customer experience, chatbots have the potential to provide a better understanding of the product performance, enable efficient use of customer time, and help build crucial customer relationships (Rese et al. 2020; Wilson-Nash et al. 2020; Xu et al. 2022). Therefore, chatbots’ potential has been highly valued by fashion retail industry and academia (Jiang et al. 2022).

This article analyzes what factors influence consumers’ choices of the type of retailer in Japan and classifies the types. Firstly, it is evident that several factors affect the choice of retail type significantly. Secondly, different formats of retail business are compared to examine the similarities and differences.

The current study investigates how retailers deal with sustainability issues in different market fields with a specific focus on fashion industry. This work examines the last ten years of the scientific literature on sustainable retailing (SR), through a systematic literature review. 215 papers selected from the EBSCO database are analyzed, in order to develop an overview on the state of the art of research on SR. A comprehensive framework for a holistic definition of SR and for retailers’ practices related to sustainability is outlined. Future research directions on SR are provided.

Retail firms have begun to pursue the marketing strategies, which stimulate consumers’ sensibility and lead people to purchase their products. The visible effects of visual merchandising (VM) arouse consumers’ interest and play an effective role in having busy people efficiently choose products. Apparel retail stores such as SPA use the offline store to be the experiential environment of their branding. Consumers’ sensitivity and response toward various visual merchandising strategies needs to be accessed. The purpose of this study is to identify VM consciousness and VM evaluation attribute factors. Relationship of such variables with other variables were accessed. As consequence variables, product satisfaction and unplanned purchase behavior were included in the study. An empirical survey data was collected from men and women of various ages. Results indicated that VM consciousness and VM evaluation attribute factors were not correlated with consumer demographic variables. VM evaluation attributes were factored into appropriateness, attractiveness and functionality dimensions. Clothing involvement and brand orientation significantly influenced product satisfaction and unplanned purchase. The direct and indirect effect (via VM consciousness) were significant. For unplanned purchase, brand orientation only had indirect effect. The influence of VM evaluation attribute factors were significant. Appropriateness had stronger effect on product satisfaction whereas attractiveness had stronger effect on unplanned behavior. Functionality dimension had only indirect effect on product satisfaction but did not show significant direct and indirect effects on unplanned purchase. This study identified the pivotal role of VM consciousness in various shopping and purchasing circumstances in offline retail store of apparel brands.

China emerges to be one of the largest wine importing and wine consumption countries in the world. With the rapid growth of Chinese wine market, it becomes an essential issue to understand the wine importing and distribution practices in Chinese wine market. This study was designated in the context of Australian wine trading to China to explore the characteristics of wine importing channels and wine retailing models in China. A semi-structured interview approach was adopted in this study to fulfil the research purposes. 15 Chinese wine industry practitioners were recruited through the 1st wine tourism trip fair in Ningxia, China, in May 2017. Interviews were transcribed and analysed using NVivo 11. The results revealed the features of 8 wine importing channels from Australia to China, and 4 distribution models in the wine retailing market in China. Regarding the wine importing channels, the 8 main importing channels were (1) retailers selected wines directly from Australian wineries; (2) retailers adopted the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) mode to produce wines; (3) supply chain businesses imported wines through their business networks; (4) wine business companies invested in overseas wineries; (5) companies purchased wines from wine exhibitions and fairs; (6) companies purchased wines from Hong Kong and other neighbouring SAR districts; (7) companies imported wines from other wine business operators; (8) companies smuggled wines by transiting from Southeast Asian countries. In addition, 4 retailing models were identified through the interviews, including (1) complete control over the distribution channels; (2) brand franchising and wholesaling; (3) enterprise subscription; (4) retailing through e-commerce and supermarkets. The findings suggested that OEM mode represented the most popular importing channel in present Chinese wine market, whilst the vendor group purchasing was the most profitable distribution models in the retailing market. Implications for wineries and wine business companies were also provided in the paper.

The channel transformation to omni-channel is currently in progress in the retail industry. For the progress to occur, facilitating meaningful experiences of customers in their customer journeys, capturing such experiences through various channels and touch points, and then analyzing the information acquired as big data are required (Lemon and Verhoef, 2016). With the increase in the number of customer experiences being observed through the internet and mobile communication, the focus is now on engagement. However, there have not yet been many studies conducted to deliberate comprehensively on how the engagements of behavioral aspects captured through various channels and the evaluation indicators of customers, as represented by the RFM or LTV, are related in a broader sense. The purpose of this research is to clarify the relational structure from a comprehensive perspective that are not constrained by monetary amounts. This paper showed results using data from the retailer. This research is divided broadly into two stages. The first stage identifies the engagements of behavioral aspects and the relationship between the respective behaviors, as well as the typification of behavioral patterns. The second stage involves clarifying the relationship between the customer’s evaluation indicators and engagement behaviors. The engagement behaviors are basically correlated with RFM, however authors found that there is no relationship between specific engagement behavior and RFM in the group of low rank customers. On the other hand, using different types of services or shops from the core business strengthens the customer relationship. Finally, the relationship between the types of engagement behaviors and the respective customer evaluation indicators is presented in the conclusion.

People prefer a certain gain over an uncertain one (e.g., Kahneman and Tversky 1979; Gneezy, List, and Wu 2006), and uncertainty threatens the perception of personal control (e.g., Simonsohn 2009; Sonsino 2008; Gaucher, Hafer, Kay, & Davidenko, 2010). Nevertheless, research has also showed that under certain circumstances people love uncertainties as “surprises” can add unexpected pleasures to our life (Goldsmith and Amir 2010; Shen, Fishbach, and Hsee 2015). In this research, we examine consumers’ preference for surprise in the subscription services. A typical subscription business offers a “surprise-me” option, where customers receive the package without knowing what items are included, in addition to (or instead of) customers making their own selections (referred to as the “self-selection” option hereafter). Despite the surging popularity of this business model, little is known whether consumers prefer making their own selections or are willingly let providers surprise them. Theoretically, it offers an opportunity to examine consumers’ willingness to relent their control in choice when there are risks involved. Managerially, answers to these questions can help service providers better design the surprise-me option for both operational efficiencies and customer satisfactions. Our key hypothesis is that a sense of personal control is an important condition for consumers’ preference of the surprise-me option in subscription services. Feeling of control serves as a safeguard and thus allows consumers to attend to the pleasures of uncertainty. This also means that in situations where consumers do not feel in control, their preference for the surprise-me option decreases (relative to the in-control condition). This is because, the compensatory control theory (Whitson & Galinsky, 2008; Kay et al., 2008; 2009) suggests that when consumers feel not in control, they tend to compensate by trying to take things into their own hands (e.g., self-select) to regain control rather than relenting control to others (e.g., to be surprised). However, when it is difficult to regain control through self-selection due to choice difficulty (e.g., lack of topical knowledge), they may again prefer surprise as a way to simply delegate the choice (Aggarwal and Mazumdar 2008; Steffel and Williams 2017). Thus, we expect feeling of control to play an important role in preference of a surprise-me option. We conducted three studies to test this prediction. Overall, the set of studies supported the expected important role of feeling of control. The surprise option is valued only when consumers do not lack the sense of control hence do not need to regain it through choice or the chance of regaining control through choice is low due to choice difficulty (expertise or product assortment characteristics). Our research provides important theoretical contributions.

The research shopping involves making use of multiple channels for a single shopping incident, such as searching from one channel and buying from another (Neslin et al. 2006, Neslin and Shankar 2009, Verhoef, Neslin and Vroomen 2007). This is an opportunistic behavior on the side of the consumers, and may result in an unfair advantage of the retailers in one channel consumers choose to purchase from. For instance, consumers may browse a product in a brick-and-mortar store, making use of the retail space and sales assistance, and proceed to buy online from another retailer which offers lower price. This is called a “showrooming” behavior (when focusing on the consumer), or channel-free riding (when focusing on the business) (Mehra, Kumar, & Raju 2013, Van Baal & Dach 2005). Offline retailers are wary of this phenomena that may lead to higher costs and lower sales, and attempt to discourage it (Rapp et al. 2015). For instance, Borders and Circuit City, the former US national chains with a substantial offline market presence, went out of business presumably due to the showrooming phenomenon (Gustin, 2012; Passariello, Kapner, & Mesco 2014). However, recent studies show that research shopping across multiple channels within one company can be managed and contributes to firm profitability in the long run (Verhoef, Kannan, & Inman 2015, Zheng et al. 2016). Kumar & Venkatesan (2005) reveal that consumers who uses multiple channels are the ones with greater customer lifetime value and with less churn intention (Blattenberg, Malthouse, & Neslin 2009, Stone, Hobbs, & Khaleeli 2002). Neslin & Shankar (2009) suggest a practical discussion on market strategy in which customers who visited offline stores can be encouraged to repeat-purchase or to foster brand involvement by maintaining contact in another channel (e.g., email newsletter). It is particularly desirable to lure online consumers to an offline site, since they tend to make greater amount of purchases in a brick-and-mortar store (Ansari, Mela, & Neslin 2008). In the age of effortless access to and switching among a plethora of channels by consumers, it is critical for a business to understand and make best of the situation. In this regard, understanding consumers in terms of who are more likely to display research shopping tendency is crucial. Depending on whether a person tends to do research shopping, business should suggest and offer different channels for different purposes (Verhoef, Kannan, & Inman 2015, Zheng et al. 2016). For instance, those with high tendency to research shop can be approached in one channel, and nudged to another for purchasing. Those with low tendency should be directed to the final purchasing channel. With this in mind, we aim to investigate research shopping behaviors and individual covariates of these shoppers using individual-level responses. We conducted an online survey in France during September 2014 in cooperation with an anonymous global marketing research firm. The survey focused mainly on exploring customers’ shopping behavior in the apparel industry, as customers’ research shopping behaviors are salient in this industry because of its experiential attributes (Girard, Silverblatt, & Korgaonkar, 2002; Klein, 1998), while traditional patterns of purchasing using only one channel is also prevalent. After a discussion with the research firm about the French apparel industry and main customers’ demographics, we restricted the respondent pool to those between the ages of 25 and 54 who have abundant experience and an active role in apparel shopping. Responses from a total of 400 participants were used in the analyses. The dataset includes individual-level shopping characteristics, demographic information, and the extent of their research shopping behavior. Specifically, each customer was asked about their apparel shopping history (purchase frequency and expenditures on apparel) over the last three months for both offline and online retailers. In addition, demographic information such as gender, age, and educational background were asked. Using multiple questions, we captured shopper’s shopping traits, such as deal-proneness, quality-consciousness, and the degree of their shopping budget flexibility. To explore the individual characteristics of research shoppers, we modeled the probability of being a research shopper using a logistic regression model. From our modeling results, we suggest two notable findings. First, customers’ qualityconsciousness significantly increases their research shopping behavior, while their deal-proneness exerts little to no influence. We conclude this is due to extensive and systematic search tendency shared by quality-conscious customers, based on previous findings in the literature. That is, quality-consciousness induces customers to search carefully across multiple channels to check on multiple quality dimensions of the options at hand, and possibly discover other similar options that may maximize their satisfaction (Lysonski, Durvasula, & Zotos 1996, Sprotles & Kendall 1986, Wesley, LeHew, & Woodside 2006). However, deal-proneness is not associated with research shopping behavior presumably because the one dimension that these customers value (i.e., price) can be easily searched in one channel—the online channel. The literature supports this finding, since studies show that deal-prone customers tend to shop more online (Close & Kukar-Kinney 2010, Devaraj, Fan, & Kohli 2002, Zhou, Dai, & Zhang 2007). We also find that the association between quality-consciousness and research shopping behavior is more pronounced when the shoppers are flexible with their shopping budget. That is, when shoppers are both quality-conscious and willing and able to consider other options or additional items beside the one they have originally planned before shopping, their research shopping tendency is enhanced. We explain that this is because consumer behaviors and decisions are made upon limited resources (e.g., time, effort, and money), and that customers with flexible resources are more likely to extend and manage their choice set (Maity, Dass, & Malhotra 2014, Malhotra 1982). These consumers do not refrain from including options that are better yet more expensive, as they can afford the superior option that suits their tastes (Becker, 1965; Ghose & Han, 2011), and without the fear of creating regrets due to discovering unaffordable options (Lenton, Fasolo, & Todd 2008). We expect our work on research shopping to provide insights to both researchers and practitioners, as today’s multi-channel environment provides opportunities for businesses to manage their customers strategically over several channels they are present in. Therefore, the research is expected to be a useful reference for understanding multi-channel shoppers for the academics, and a valuable guide to retail firms that aim to not only cope with the multi-channel environment but to become a true omni-channel player.

Recently, more and more consumers have changed from shopping in a single channel to multi-channel. Therefore, maintaining a long-term customer relationship becomes an important issue for retailers in this complex shopping circumstance. This study decides to understand how online retailers keep their valuable consumers in current store and even duplicate the original relationship to an extended channel.

It was Macy’s (a department store in the U.S.) which introduced the concept of ‘omnichannel’ in 2010 for the first time, and, at present, representative U.S. retailers have also adopted the approach. In Japan, the effort to interlock real and Internet stores started around the same time. Big retailers have promoted its omnichannel strategies by providing services in which customers can order merchandise on the Internet and receive it in a store. The purpose of this paper is to clarify the characteristics of the Japanese type of omnichannel by comparing it to the U.S. type. Rigby (2011) defines omnichannel as “an integrated sales experience that melds the advantages of physical stores with the information-rich experience of online shopping.” Lazaris & Vrechopoulos (2014) refer to it as “the use of both physical and online channels combined with the delivery of seamless shopping experiences.” Kondo (2015) understands it as “a marketing approach that integrates all (omni) channels and provides consumers with a seamless shopping experience.”