E-Commerce Case Study

With the development of the Internet the concept of E-commerce and E-business became more and more popular. The term of E-commerce was first introduced by Turban et al. (2002). After that the concept of the online shopping as a separate process became more accepted. Nowadays there is a growing competition between physical stores and online e-commerce stores. The researchers tried to determine if the consumers’ behavior is different for the online shopping and what are the main reasons for their purchases in the Internet. For example, Monsuwe, Dellaert and Ruyter (2004) introduced the technology acceptance model to explain the reason for online shopping. They proposed a theory and explained that there must be a reason why the customers prefer

Firstly, as it was already mentioned there is a serious price competition on fashion industry market. To win it a company has to reduce costs, which is one of the benefits of E-commerce. Secondly, E-commerce helps with a sale that is not less important in fashion industry. Thirdly, one of the functions of E-commerce is to facilitate communication with suppliers and consumers, and it’s very important in fashion industry business as well. Moreover, using E-commerce can give a company additional competitive advantages on fashion industry market and change the particular market in general. Nowadays, with the introduction and rise of e-commerce in fashion industry, it is very important not to ignore different kinds of social networks and applications. The main reason is that most customers tend to look for online content before making any purchase. Instagram, various fashion and lifestyle blogs, newly appeared applications are often used by customers before the purchase is

Due to the specifics of the goods offered, the customers need to interact with the product, meaning they have to be able to see it clearly and touch it. Furthermore, while discussing E-commerce, the consumers’ behavior is governed by 2 groups of stimuli – functionality and emotionality. As such, we can identify two large groups of customers – utilitarian and hedonistic. Some authors, such as Jones et al. (2010), Kaltcheva & Weitz (2006), Van Rompay et al. (2012) discovered that for hedonistic customers the interior design of the store is much more important than for utilitarian customers. Besides, the most important task of the store is to ensure customers’ loyalty.

In relation to fashion industry, the researchers often proposed that the design of the fashion store plays an additional role in the business model of fashion retailers. It needs to be pointed out that different researchers assign different additional functions to it:

(1) Barnes & Lea-Greenwood (2010) argue that store design can be used as additional channel of the marketing communication in the fast fashion segment,

(2) Parsons (2011) and Ballantine et al. (2015) think that the design must create a special fashion atmosphere to attract