Online Apparel Research Articles

Determinants of online apparel mass customization: a decade in review

PurposeMass customization is a production process that allows consumers to customize products from an array of options to suit their preferences and needs and benefit from large-scale production efficiencies. In recent years, several apparel retailers have integrated customization into their online presence. While the benefits of online apparel mass customization (OAMC) are apparent, factors that determine the usage of the process are many. Therefore, it is important to explore these factors and understand the relationships between them and the impact on the intention to use OAMC.Design/methodology/approachA review of studies published in the last decade was conducted through the Scopus, Web of Science and JSTOR databases in September 2023. Peer-reviewed research articles published in the English language were included. These studies were carried out in the United States of America, Canada, Korea and China and addressed motivations and antecedents of OAMC technology.FindingsThe data were extracted, and the findings were synthesized. The review process enabled us to examine several theories and determinants of OAMC. The latter were categorized into the following themes: “consumer personality and psychology”, “consumer perceptions”, “consumer behaviour determinants” and “process, experience and product”. The influence of consumer personality traits, psychogenic needs, characteristics and other facilitating conditions emerged through the review.Originality/valueThe purpose of this paper is to study the various determinants of OAMC and thereby provide valuable information to businesses in OAMC domains to improve customized processes, understand consumers' motivations and develop marketing strategies that improve overall satisfaction with OAMC.

Experimental evidence that activewear retail imagery elicits physiological, attentional and self-reported markers of body image threat in women

Online apparel retail imagery is a prominent threat to women’s body image, particularly segments such as activewear which emphasize the value of women’s bodies. In a within-subjects experiment, we exposed women (N = 128) to imagery randomly selected from activewear, casualwear and homewares websites and measured their gaze behavior, physiological arousal, as well as subjective emotional states and body image ratings. Exposure to activewear retail imagery elicited significantly lower body image ratings, a higher negative emotional state, and a lower positive emotional state compared to the other website imagery conditions. Physiological arousal was significantly higher for both apparel imagery conditions compared to the homewares imagery condition. Body biased gaze behavior was significantly higher for the activewear imagery condition compared to the casualwear imagery condition. Notably, body shame moderated the self-reported but not the physiological experimental effects, such that women with higher body shame experienced stronger adverse changes in their body image and emotional state ratings following activewear exposure. Correlations revealed that self-reported experimental responses to activewear imagery were strongly associated with self-objectification, appearance comparison, disordered eating and body image coping attitudes. Thus, exposure to popular apparel may play a role in maintaining maladaptive body image attitudes and behaviors in women.

Impact of Virtual Fitting Technology on Online Apparel Sales in Ghana

Impact of Virtual Fitting Technology on Online Apparel Sales in Ghana

Enabling self-service technology (SST) using an intelligent chatbot to advance the online apparel co-design process

ABSTRACT Apparel co-design in online has emerged as a promising approach to enhancing customer experience by offering customised apparel. However, effectively communicating accurate product requirements through product configurators for co-design is a challenge for non-specialists. This study proposes an approach to improve the online apparel co-design by developing a natural language-based, self-service technology-enabled chatbot to effectively elicit customer requirements. The study was based on sports bra as a case study, with a Wizard of Oz approach used to characterise the chatbot requirements through a newly developed website. Thematic analysis was conducted on chatlogs generated by thirty participants who co-designed a sports bra with the assistance of a product expert. Key findings were used to develop a reference model based on a morphological box, which helps design and develop a chatbot on product configurators in the online apparel retail industry to enhance experience through effective customer requirement elicitation.

Effects of online customer reviews on sustainable clothing purchase intentions: The mediating role of perceived diagnosticity

AbstractOnline customer reviews play a vital role in evaluating product or service performance and serve as an important reference for other customers' purchase decisions. This study explores the influence of online customer reviews on sustainable clothing purchase intention through text mining and survey‐based methodologies. The results showed that online customer reviews focused on four dimensions: material ecology, clothing fashion, clothing functionality, and price reasonableness. Online customer reviews have a positive impact on consumers' sustainable purchase intentions, and perceived diagnosticity mediates the relationship between online customer reviews and purchase intentions. In addition, customers' prior sustainability knowledge moderates the relationship between material ecology, price reasonableness, and perceived diagnosticity. This study further enriches theoretical research on sustainable consumption within the context of online apparel retailing and helps sustainable apparel brands more accurately grasp the influencing variables of customers' sustainable consumption behaviours and formulate precise electronic word‐of‐mouth marketing strategies.

Enhancing Body Measurement Accuracy and Immersive Experience with Virtual/Augmented Reality in E – Commerce Platform

n the realm of e-commerce, achieving accurate body measurements for clothing is a persistent challenge. This project utilizes Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR/AR) technologies to revolutionize online shopping. It introduces a feature where users can enhance cloth fitting based on their measurements, reducing sizing issues and improving customer satisfaction. Users can input measurements like bust, waist, and hips to customize their fit, leading to a more seamless shopping experience and reducing returns. The project also includes a VR-based prototype for a virtual clothing store, enhancing engagement and aesthetics while redefining online apparel retailing standards. IndexTerms - Online Shopping,E-Commerce,ill-fiting,Virtual Reality,HTML,CSS,JavaScript

Identity‐consistent transfer learning of portraits for digital apparel sample display

AbstractThe rapid development of the online apparel shopping industry demands innovative solutions for high‐quality digital apparel sample displays with virtual avatars. However, developing such displays is prohibitively expensive and prone to the well‐known “uncanny valley” effect, where a nearly human‐looking artifact arouses eeriness and repulsiveness, thus affecting the user experience. To effectively mitigate the “uncanny valley” effect and improve the overall authenticity of digital apparel sample displays, we present a novel photo‐realistic portrait generation framework. Our key idea is to employ transfer learning to learn an identity‐consistent mapping from the latent space of rendered portraits to that of real portraits. During the inference stage, the input portrait of an avatar can be directly transferred to a realistic portrait by changing its appearance style while maintaining the facial identity. To this end, we collect a new dataset, Daz‐Rendered‐Faces‐HQ (DRFHQ), specifically designed for rendering‐style portraits. We leverage this dataset to fine‐tune the StyleGAN2‐FFHQ generator, using our carefully crafted framework, which helps to preserve the geometric and color features relevant to facial identity. We evaluate our framework using portraits with diverse gender, age, and race variations. Qualitative and quantitative evaluations, along with ablation studies, highlight our method's advantages over state‐of‐the‐art approaches.

Tailoring Garment Fit for Personalized Body Image Enhancement: Insights from Digital Fitting Research

In the context of the Fashion Apparel Industry 4.0, a transformative evolution is directed towards the Online Apparel Mass Customization (OAMC) strategy, which provides efficient and personalized apparel product solutions to consumers. A critical challenge within this customization process is the determination of sizes. While existing research addresses comfort evaluation in relation to wearer and garment fit, little attention has been given to how garment fit influences the wearer’s body image, which is also an important purchase consideration. This study investigates the impact of garment fit on the wearer’s body scale perception using quantitative research design. A digital dataset of avatars, clothed in varying sizes of T-shirts, were created for the body scale perception experiment, and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) model was developed to predict the effect of T-shirt fit on body image. With only a small number of garments and body measurements as inputs, the ANN model can accurately predict the body scales of the clothed persons. It was found that the effect of apparel fit on body image varies depending on the wearer’s gender, body size, and shape. This model can be applied to enhance the online garment shopping experience with respect to personalized body image enhancement.

Decoding Gen Y Online Shopping Patterns: A Model-based Study

Consumer decision-making has been examined extensively by both marketers and researchers. This examination is not only instrumental in identifying market challenges and opportunities but also in strategizing to address these profitably. This particular study aims to fill such a research void by exploring and analysing the factors that contribute to understanding consumer decision-making styles, specifically in the context of online apparel shopping among Indian Generation Y consumers. A sample of 335 Generation Y consumers was surveyed, and exploratory factor analysis was carried out using SPSS 26 to identify the dominant decision-making styles. Following this, confirmatory factor analysis was performed using SPSS AMOS to validate the existence of the model. The outcomes of this study indicate that the decision-making styles of Generation Y are significantly influenced by multiple factors including website quality consciousness, hedonic and incentive motivations, societal and external circumstances, as well as novelty orientation and impulsiveness.

The role of mobile web atmospherics in online apparel purchase: the mediating roles of consumer emotions and attitude

The role of mobile web atmospherics in online apparel purchase: the mediating roles of consumer emotions and attitude

Automatic Generation of Interactive Nonlinear Video for Online Apparel Shopping Navigation

We present an automatic generation pipeline of interactive nonlinear video for online apparel shopping navigation. Our approach was inspired by Google's “Messy Middle” theory, which suggests that people mentally are faced with two tasks—exploration and evaluation—before purchasing online. Given a set of apparel product presentation videos, our navigation UI organizes them to optimize users' product exploration and automatically generates interactive videos for users' product evaluation. To support automatic methods, we proposed a video clustering similarity ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\operatorname{CSIM}$</tex-math></inline-formula> ) and a camera movement similarity ( <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\operatorname{MSIM}$</tex-math></inline-formula> ), as well as a comparative video generation algorithm for product recommendation, presentation, and comparison. To evaluate our pipeline's effectiveness, we conducted several user studies. The results showed that our pipeline can help users complete the consumption process more efficiently, making it easier for them to understand and choose a product.

Investigating The Intervening Role of E-Satisfaction in The Formation of E-Loyalty Among Online Apparel Shoppers

The current study investigates the effect of e-satisfaction in the formation of e-loyalty among online clothing customers. We evaluated four main hypotheses using empirical analysis, including the impact of recognisable brands, celebrity endorsements, and favourable pricing on e-satisfaction, as well as the overarching relationship between e-satisfaction and e-loyalty. The research population is limited to people between the ages of 20 and 55 residing in Hyderabad, Telangana, India. The participants are chosen using a convenience sampling procedure with a sample size of 150.The findings strongly confirm the assumptions, demonstrating that both well-known companies and celebrity endorsements have a considerable impact on e-satisfaction. Furthermore, while favourable pricing contributes to e-satisfaction, its impact is less than that of brand reputation and endorsements. Notably, e-satisfaction appeared as a critical intervening variable, with a strong and significant link to e-loyalty. The findings emphasise the importance of e-satisfaction in moulding e-loyalty, implying that businesses can deliberately spend in improving brand reputation, obtaining quality endorsements, and optimising price to maximise both e-satisfaction and eventual e-loyalty. These findings provide important insights for online clothing companies trying to increase consumer happiness and develop long-term loyalty.&#x0D;

A systematic literature review and analysis of try-on technology: Virtual fitting rooms

To enhance customer satisfaction and transform negative perceptions of online apparel shopping, fashion brands are increasingly adopting virtual fitting rooms. Despite clothing being the most frequently purchased item online, customers often struggle to find garments that fit their size and skin tone. Consequently, the clothing industry experiences a higher return rate compared to other e-commerce sectors. To address this issue, fashion brands prioritize the implementation of try-on technology, aiming to improve product visibility and provide sensory input. However, existing studies have yielded conflicting findings. This research aims to resolve this issue by organizing and categorizing the relevant literature. To collect related publications, scholarly databases such as Scopus, Emerald, Springer, Wiley, Science Direct, ProQuest, and IEEE Xplore were extensively searched. The investigation employed a systematic literature review strategy, with the search conducted from January 2005 to February 2023. Ultimately, eighty publications meeting the selection criteria were chosen for further review. The study classifies the literature into subfields based on publication year and region, thoroughly exploring various aspects of TOT, including theories, influencing factors, moderating, or mediating variables, outcomes, and notable findings. Based on the evaluation results, a conceptual model and research gap for TOT is proposed to guide future research in this domain, providing valuable insights for both the management and academic research communities.

Understanding the information characteristics of consumers’ online reviews: the evidence from Chinese online apparel shopping

Understanding the information characteristics of consumers’ online reviews: the evidence from Chinese online apparel shopping

Online Apparel Purchase and Responsible Consumption Among Malaysians

Customer loyalty is a critical factor for the long-term success of all businesses, especially in the Malaysian apparel industry and its growth where the competition is intense. This study addresses the growing demand for improved fashion trends and brand recognition among consumers in Malaysia, which has intensified competition in the apparel sector. The primary objective of this research is to investigate the impact of online brand image, country of origin and online customer loyalty on apparel shoppers’ loyalty. To achieve this, research framework is designed to present an in-depth understanding of identified variables towards customer loyalty. In this study, a comprehensive survey using online questionnaire for data gathering was used and 147 valid responses were obtained from Malaysian online shoppers of apparels. Data were analysed by employing multiple regression analysis. The results demonstrate that both online brand image and country of origin exert a positive influence on customer satisfaction, thereby contributing to enhanced customer loyalty within the clothing and footwear industry in Malaysia. Additionally, this research emphasizes the importance of ethical purchasing decisions when shopping online, as these decisions encourage responsible consumption and reduce environmental impact.

ANALYZING THE INFLUENCE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL FACTORS ON IMPULSIVE BUYING OF APPAREL CUSTOMERS DURING FACEBOOK LIVE STREAM (CASE STUDY: KLONTONG MANADO ONLINE SHOP SULAWESI UTARA)

The purpose of this study is to analyze the influence of psychological factors on impulsive buying behavior of apparel customers during Facebook live streams, with a case study of the Klontong Manado Online Shop in Sulawesi Utara. The study examines the psychological factors that may lead to impulsive buying behavior, such as Motivation, Attitude, Learning and Perception. This research uses Quantitative Approach with 96 from apparel customers who have participated in the Facebook live streams of Klontong Manado Online Shop. The study found that motivation, attitude, and learning do not significantly influence impulsive buying, while perception has a highly positive and significant effect on impulse purchases of clothes during live streaming on the "Klontong Manado Online Shop" Facebook group. Additionally, all four factors have a simultaneous and significant effect on impulsive buying of clothes through live streaming in the group. The findings of this study could provide insights for online apparel retailers to better understand and leverage the psychological factors that influence impulsive buying behavior during live stream shopping events. Keywords: psychological factors, impulsive buying

Contradictory Narratives on Drivers and Barriers of Online Shopping Intentions for Apparel among Customers in Kerala

Apparels are the frills of social embellishment and the medium for defining one’s personality. The rapid advancement in information technology, online banking, and smartphone accessibility has resulted in exponential growth in online apparel shopping in developing countries, with India ranking second in market potential. A spectrum of internal and external factors influences people’s intentions to buy online, with customers’ attitudes shaped by perceptions being the most influential one. The descriptive study using first-hand data investigates the perceptions regarding drivers and barriers of online shopping intentions for apparel among online and offline preferring customers in Kerala. There are diverging arguments for and against online apparel shopping, labelled as drivers and barriers. The discussions hint that, for customers who prefer to shop online, the perceived impact of drivers outweighs the barriers. However, customers who prefer offline overweigh the impact of barriers on online shopping intentions rather than what drivers could exert. The study concludes that people’s perceptions of how drivers and barriers impact their online apparel shopping intentions serve as the foundation for their preferences of being online or offline. The contradictory narratives of the perceived impact of drivers and barriers on customers’ online shopping intentions have classified strategic implications for businessmen in understanding consumer behaviour patterns and effectively enrooting their products.

Relevance of trust and satisfaction as mediators to behavioural intention of consumers towards online apparel shopping

The Internet is an integral part of every individual and is a means of business transaction, leading to the immense growth of e-commerce in all sectors. This research study evaluates the significance of attitude as a mediating variable between behavioural intention and overall satisfaction in apparel shopping using Partial Least Square – Structural Equation Modelling with a bootstrapping approach for evaluating the hypothesis. A total of 227 consumers were surveyed using a structured questionnaire and convenient sampling method with a cross-sectional method for collecting data. The hypothesis states that there is a significant relationship between overall satisfaction effect &amp; attitude, reputation &amp; trust, attitude &amp; behavioural intention and trust &amp; behavioural intention. Evidence of the partial mediation effect of attitude between overall satisfaction and behavioural intention is also identified. The findings indicate that the model is valid and has a good fit. Therefore, improved customer service and delivery service will help the corporate to uplift the endogenous latent variable of Behavioural Intention.

Investigating Expectancy Values in Online Apparel Rental during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic: Moderating Effects of Fashion Leadership

Online apparel renting has become a popular type of consumption. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the sharing economy, including online renting. This cross-sectional study examined the effects of expectancy values on intention towards online apparel rental during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and investigated the moderating role of personal traits of fashion leadership. A total of 431 valid samples from college students in the US were collected. Structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to test the hypothesized relationships, and moderation analysis was performed to test the moderating effects of fashion leadership. The results indicated that expectancy values affecting consumer intention toward online apparel renting varied during and post-pandemic. The results also indicated that fashion leadership moderated the links between relative advantage and intention to rent apparel online during the pandemic, while it moderated the relationships between compatibility and psychological ownership and intention toward online apparel rental after the pandemic. This study sheds light on the expectancy values that shape consumers’ intentions to rent apparel online, considering moderating effects of fashion leadership from which strategic marketing and communication plans could be developed to enhance consumer experience and engagement and expand the online apparel rental market.

Post-purchase online customer experience with apparel retailing: a structural equation modelling approach

ABSTRACT With the expansion of the internet and the reduction of impediments in the supply chain, online apparel retailing is expanding its reach for unserved people. This growth in the online customer base has posed challenges for e-retailers to provide a better online customer experience (OCX) in the post-purchase stage and retain them. However, in online retailing, OCX in the post-purchase stage is imperative, as the customer can experience apparel only after delivery. This study intends to examine the role of post-purchase OCX dimensions of online apparel retailing in determining customer satisfaction and repurchase intention. An online survey approach has been adopted to collect 491 valid responses from customers who are well-versed in online apparel shopping. A proposed model has been tested using confirmatory factor analysis with structural equation modelling and analysis support, which validates the hypotheses drawn. Findings imply e-commerce decision-makers scrutinise critical post-purchase touchpoints for making websites customer-driven.