Who seeks a surprise box? Predictors of consumers’ use of fashion and beauty subscription-based online services (SOS)

What's in the Box? Investigation of Beauty Subscription Box Retail Services

“…The mean age was 32 years, with range of 19‐72 years. Similar to Woo and Ramkumar () in which the mean age of respondents was 33 years, the mean age of respondents in this study was younger than the US population's median age (= 36.8 years). All participants answered that they were current members of one or more beauty SBRS.…”

“…Jin, Sternquist, and Koh () reported that consumers responded differently to product prices and that product price was a multidimensional cue to determine consumers’ hedonic shopping value for clothing and durable goods. Recently, price in the context of SBRS has been mentioned (Woo & Ramkumar, ).…”

“…Akin to a Christmas gift, customers of SBRS do not know what they are going to receive in their monthly box until they open it. Since the component of surprise encourages cognitive activity, customers may be drawn to the exploratory feature of shopping through SBRS (Woo & Ramkumar, ).…”

“…By adapting the core concept of the subscription‐based business, at present, there are numerous SBRS in operation in the U.S. For instance, Noorda () reported that SBRS have experienced exponential growth, with demands for SBRS increasing almost 30 times between 2013 and 2016. There are different SBRS, which are industry‐specific such as publishing books and magazines (Noorda, ), beauty and fashion (Bhatt, ; Sivathanu, ; Woo & Ramkumar, ), and video‐streaming such as Netflix and Amazon Prime (Wayne, ). However, the present study focuses exclusively on beauty‐related SBRS like Birchbox, Ipsy, Glossybox, and others.…”

“…Scholars (Sivathanu, ) have noted the lack of empirical studies in this sector of SBRS. Only a few studies (Woo & Ramkumar, ) have investigated this specific SBRS sector. Thus, studies on beauty‐related SBRS are needed within the USA or beyond (for the Indian market, see Sivathanu, ).…”