Competitive e‐tailing strategies for fair trade organizations

Abstract

PurposeThis study aims to provide competitive e‐tailing strategies for fair trade organizations using a benchmarking approach.Design/methodology/approachA coding guide was developed to obtain information available on 28 fair trade web sites and 28 commercial web sites focusing on company information, product information, distribution channels, customer service, and web site structure/media service.FindingsResults revealed several evidences that fair trade organizations presented limited information online, compared with commercial organizations.Research limitations/implicationsFewer commercial retailers benchmarked in the study sold handicrafts, compared with fair trade organizations. Discrepancies in the proportion of products carried by each organization may result in limited generalization of the findings across product categories.Practical implicationsThrough benchmarking against profit‐making business leaders, fair trade organizations would be able to evaluate strengths and weaknesses for their current online business operations and explore opportunities and improvement in web site management.Originality/valueThis paper provides valuable managerial implications for fair trade organizations focusing on web site operations. Information availability and strategic web site management can attract customers to make purchases on fair trade web sites and, in turn, enable organizations to sustain and grow in the competitive marketplace.

Social and environmental sustainability in the clothing industry: a case study of a fair trade retailer

“…This is supported by Joergens's (2006) research into ethical fashion, which found that focus group participants aged between 21 and 25 were ''positively surprised'' by the styles of the garments in the People Tree catalogue. Halepete and Park (2006) found that Fair Trade retailers provided less information to consumers than successful commercial competitors. In contrast to this, People Tree provides information to its customers relating to its products and suppliers, which currently exceeds the amount of information provided by its mainstream retail competitors in this respect.…”

“…(p. 418). Halepete and Park (2006) claim that there is ''a growing awareness of Fair Trade and socially responsible businesses among consumers and industry professionals'' (p. 492). This view was validated by an increase of 46 per cent in the sales of Fair Trade products in general in the UK in 2006 (Santi and Spear, 2007).…”

“…This view was validated by an increase of 46 per cent in the sales of Fair Trade products in general in the UK in 2006 (Santi and Spear, 2007). Certain academics posit the idea that Fair Trade could become universally adopted in the future (Low and Davenport, 2006;Valor, 2006) and several studies have been conducted into the market for Fair Trade products, though only a limited amount of academic research has been carried out to examine the specific relationship between Fair Trade and clothing (Halepete and Park, 2006;Halepete et al, 2009;Littrell et al, 2005;Littrell and Dickson, 1998;Shaw et al, 2006). Fair Trade fashion was estimated to have a market share of £5m in Great Britain in 2006, a figure that was predicted by the Fair Trade Foundation to double in the following year (Santi and Spear, 2007), demonstrating that there could be a potential interest for further literature on this topic, due to increasing development in this sector.…”

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“…Suggested strategies were increasing flexibility in the supply of artisans; recruiting volunteers for sales and retailing in the US; increasing quality and ethnicity in product design; linking customer to artisans; and creating new store images. Website designs between FTOs and mainstream retailers were also compared to encourage competitive approaches of marketing (see Halepete & Park, 2006).…”

“…With the fast growing consumer awareness, fair trade apparel has been a target for research in the areas of retail performance (Halepete & Park, 2006;Littrell & Dickson, 1998), corporate commitment (Goworek, 2011;Jones, Hillier, & Comfort, 2014), consumer characteristics (Halepete, Littrell, & Park, 2009), and purchase behaviors (Ma & Lee, 2012). While fair trade movement of apparel products is rapidly expanding, there is a dearth of understanding about the characteristics of consumers who regularly purchase fair trade apparel products.…”