Studying Consumer Motivation Towards De-shopping While Purchasing High-end Luxury and Fashionable Apparel

Abstract

Consumption of organized retail services is not only limited to buying apparel but to the overall customer experience of visiting the shop, interactions with executives, offers, hospitality, and the freedom to view and try a range of products uninterruptedly. The unorganized fashion retail in rural markets provides home delivery of a range of products to help female consumers choose, try, pick one, and return the rest so that only picked items can be billed. It is an unspoken communication that the buyer is sometimes permitted to consume the product without paying for it. This act, though, cannot be accommodated in the definition of de-shopping but establishes the argument that de-shopping can be part of the services offered by the organization retailers. There are organizations which accept the de-shopping behaviours of their selected customers to enhance customer loyalty. In this paper, exploratory research has been conducted in the NCR region of India, in which customers of high-end luxury and fashionable apparel respond to the questionnaire which recorded the impulsiveness, intention, satisfaction and urge of returning the used apparel either for an exchange or simply complete financial waiver. A total of 170 respondents were approached to answer 17 questions asking the various emotional arguments consumers put forward while de-shopping. This helped the study to develop a scale which showed all four factors that have a significant impact on product return.