Analysing online shopping attributes to influence consumer purchasing for fashion products

Abstract

The fashion industry has stepped into the digital era. There are a great number of firms moving to be the digital companies with the major business process all being supported by the internet (Hajji et al., 2012;Bruce and Daly, 2011). A recent study from Mintel (2012) finds that online fashion purchase has increased by 152% in the UK over the last five years. The aim of this study is to identify the main factors that affect consumer purchases of fashion products online: technology (e-service quality, Poddar et al., 2009;Chen et al., 2010), shopping factor (Verhagen and van Dolen, 2011); website design (Zhang and von Dran, 2000), social media (Gillen and Merchant, 2013; Kim and Ko, 2010) and online atmospherics (Wang et al., 2011). The research involved a quantitative method. A targeted online questionnaire was used to question the target customer group. Data analysis was conducted using compare means, frequency analysis and factor analysis. As for the results, the study confirms that online atmospherics and social media contribute more to online shoppers' purchasing behaviour; as for the rest of online attributes, to some extent, they pose certain impacts on online fashion shoppers purchase behaviour.